Missing The Forest For The Trees...

Since my local show was dismal as far as revenues was concerned, I had time to shop for other material... bulk/scrounger lots to play with. One dealer at the show had several boxes of collection lots and dealer stock remnants. Amongst the latter were a number of standard 6x9 dealer binders with country or area remnants marked with ludicrously high catalog values but dirt cheap prices. The major problem was that most of the stamps were seconds, thus nullifying the catalog value claims.

I watched any number of customers pick up various binder books, flip through the first few pages, and immediately put them back, usually with a look of disgust or contempt.

On the way out the door I stopped by for one last look and one book in particular caught my eye. I made an offer, it was accepted, and I finally got around to going through it last night.

It was a book of mint U.S. airmail stamps, supposedly $800 in catalog value, for a marked price of $40. I bought it for $32. It started with US Scott # C9 and went on from there. Most of the early material either had disturbed gum, natural straight edges, or other flaws, which is why people immediately jettisoned the book. Even on the sound material, while 100 examples of a $1.00 catalog value stamp is indeed $100 catalog value, what the heck are you going to do with that? You can't sell them as singles, and even as sets you're going to be a LONG time recouping the investment as a whole, not to mention a LOT of work.

So why did I buy and no one else did?

Most of the people I saw were only looking at the front of the binders, seeing the poor quality, and rejecting them without bothering to look all the way through and then evaluate each binder as a whole.

What I ended up with for my $32:

1. About $65 net sale price in sound singles that I can send off to the APS store.

2. Another $150 or so in net value that I can either send off to the APS as a donation or may offer here in SCF donation packets.

3. Here is where the REAL meat of the value was, not in terms of Scott value as collectible stamps, but as a usable commodity. I think people didn't even consider that air mail stamps are valid for postage! Full gum postage in denominations of 4 cents to 25 cents: $94.50 face.

So I paid roughly 33% of face for postage and got all the other stuff free.

The moral of the story: when evaluating a bulk lot, (1) look at it from different perspectives and multiple possible uses, and (2) you never know what might be lurking under or behind the crud; it sometimes pays to persevere... I can't count the number of times where otherwise mundane or craptacular lots have yielded either isolated gems or considerable overall value.

Postage use is ALWAYS my bottom line when considering a purchase.

I had a recent find like that on ebay. I could tell all the US stuff was mint and modern and I could see a bunch of the sheets were from the 2005-11 Era but the pictures were sparse. There were sheets on top of others but couldn't see what was underneath. The seller had it priced at a starting bid of $50 with $45 shipping. The high shipping was due to a complete 3 binder set of the Mystic Heirloom album (not one picture of what was inside though), a Harris Ambassador album and a 2 volume (4 inch thick each) Harris Standard album set. Someone bid $50, another bid $51 and another bid $52. With about 10 seconds left, I put in a high bid and won it for $54. So for $99, I had about 40 pounds of stuff coming my way.

When I received it, the sheets of modern (37c up to forever) mint sheets, partial sheets and singles added up to close to $700 in face value. The rest of the stuff was just icing on the cake.

I did start a thread on it at the time but can't find it now.

The best part was giving the Mystic album to a co-worker and getting him started in stamp collecting.

revenue collector wrote: "I think people didn't even consider that air mail stamps are valid for postage........." Funny; I just used an 8 cent Goddard air mail stamp yesterday on a letter.