China, Japan And Some Ceylon Anything Valuable?

I inherited a trunk full of stamps from my grandmother. I've been going through them trying to figure out if any of them have value. I want to keep the collection but just find a few valuable ones (if there are any) and sell just those. I probably wouldn't be interested in selling anything unless it was greater than $500 or so because I like the collection. Do any of these have value? Also, what is the best way to determine their value? There are 3 pages in photobucket. By the way, I saw one similar to the first picture on ebay for $99,000

http://s1317.photobucket.com/user/L...ort=2&page=1

I'm by no means a China expert, but most of the stamps I see look very common (i.e. dime value).
But since I'm no expert someone else might have a better answer on these for you.

Welcome Lamp100,
Most are common China and Japan mixed. The best way to go about finding their value is research them in stamp catalogs. Since there are so many variables that would determine their value its hard to tell from pictures.
I have magnifiers and telescopes to see the details more clearly. Secret marks, color etc. that have to be determined. Most library's have Scotts catalogs to look thru. There are many websites that can help also.
Respectfully, Gary

Let me add one other thing. These were your Grandmothers and I'm sure she spent alot of time with them. So maybe just getting the catalogs and going thru them and enjoy knowing her hands touched them. I acquired my stamps the same way and when I touch my stamps I always think of my Grandmother.

Thanks so much for the advice. I have checked out the scott cataloges from the library before but found they were lacking in so many details such as postmarks, precancels, etc. I found stamps I had in there that were not exactly the stamp I had and didn't know what to do about it other than order specialty books. The problem is her collection is world wide and I would have to order so many books...

Gary, I do love that the collection is (mostly) from her. (Some were my dad's as well). I like to think about her life when I look through them. She had such an amazing life actually. She was a Dutch lady born and married in indonesia before it was called that and while it was the Dutch East Indies. She lived through the Japanese invasion with her two children and her military officer husband missing in a Japanese concentration camp for two years. She collected all during that time and I have a large collection of stamps from there. I think about what she must have gone through as I see the progression of the stamps first as a Dutch colony, then as a Japanese occupied country and then as the country of Indonesia was born. My family lost everything in that war as the house and all their belongings, etc were striped from them when they had to escape back to Holland on a ship with her stamp books in tow. Her whole life and the war and everything all displayed for me on the pages of her albums. It is an amazing thing to have them. I snapped a few pictures of some pages from these books to share.

http://s1317.photobucket.com/user/L...ort=2&page=1

Hi Lamp100,
Thanks for sharing those. I had the same problems with identification of certain stamps. I found older versions of worldwide catalogs on ebay and a few books at goodwill stores. You may want to check that out. The 6 album 2010 scotts I found on ebay was 60 dollars. I have used them and not needed a specialized catalog. Most of the precancels and overprints were in there for China and Japan, just had to go to those pages that referenced to that stamp. A bit confusing at times.
Postmarks are another beast to deal with. I use the internet for identification of postmarks.
At least you can still put a scan photo of some stamps. That makes it a little better for the community to respond on information about the stamps. There's a lot of knowledge out here. Just sitting back and following posts helps, plus the search function lets you look up past posts about certain stamps. Gary

Good idea about the old Scott books. I will have to do that and I'm sure paying attention of the forums here will help me as well.

Lamp: I hope you're still checking this thread.

I would agree with what everyone has said that these are pretty much common stamps, but, at least for the Japanese stamps, there are a couple of different types of cancellations that would make those particular stamps a little more special -- not necessarily valuable, but perhaps a little more sought-after, so don't just toss them into a packet with the others (in my opinion).

One type of cancellation is the "roller cancel". When you just have only the cancelled stamp in front of you, it'll look rectangular, rather than round. Here is an example from the pictures you posted:



Another type of cancellation that is a little more sought-after are the "English" cancels -- in other words, those showing the Roman alphabet, rather than Japanese characters, like this one:



The Scott catalogs are a great place to start, but they will hardly ever show cancels (maybe in the US specialized, for a few types). Cancels tend to be the province of specialized catalogs, sometimes in English, sometimes only in the home-country language. It really is quite an area of specialization, country by country.

However, you might find helpful the visual stamp identifier in the back of any volume of the Scott catalog. (At least those in recent memory.) There is a special section for non-Western alphabets, and they show examples that should help you distinguish Japanese stamps from Chinese.

With that in mind, if you see a little sun with rays emanating from it, that's China. If you see a chrysanthemum blossom, that's Japan. I can see that some of the Japan ones that you show do not have that symbol (because that symbol represented the Japanese empire, and ended by about 1948), but you should usually be able to find a character that looks something like an "8", but with squared corners, and that's very likely Japan also, like the far lowest-left character in this stamp:



And to complicate things just a bit, the characters read right-to-left before about 1948 and left-to-right afterwards, like in the image above.

Good luck with all this, and please don't hesitate to ask more questions!

-- Dave

[edit: figured out what I did wrong the first time]

Also, if you're referring to this stamp as being offered for $99,000 on ebay:



I would be skeptical. It's a Japanese revenue stamp (meaning that it paid a government tax or fee, rather than paid for postal services). Revenue stamps aren't catalogued in Scott either, and so perhaps some person was hopeful that this stamp was a great heretofore unknown rarity!

I'm not good at Japanese revenue values, but I would say it's probably worth less than $1 (unless there is something spectacularly rare about it that I don't see).

Hope this is all helpful!

Good luck with this project!

-- Dave

Well, if someone does figure out why that Revenue is worth $99,000 then please be sure to inform us. Here's my copy, that I have never been able to, nor tried, to identify. Mine seems to have some type of overprint that didn't quite make it onto the stamp, though.

Partime: And I'll dig some out from the old stockbooks, too!

I think that red thing is a stamp cancellation -- revenue stamps were often cancelled this way, with a "chop" or seal, tieing it to the document (or other stamps). I can't read that character at all, but oftentimes the cancellation just says "cancelled".

-- Dave

Thanks Dave. Yes, the more I look at it, it looks like a downward pointing arrow. Definitely a cancellation, not an overprint.