Question For Big Blue Experts

No decent complete sets of Internationals . Two sets but one worked over and the other had pages removed . What I am seeing more and more are certain countries pulled out of larger collections, so it become difficult to find intact sets of Internationals .
But did find a gem of a lot .The problem is so many of the lots are manufactured by the auction firm or the consignor to have the right appeal to strike that balance of suggested bid price.The auction house has to keep the opening bid low enough to keep the buyers wondering if it is worth while to stay for the auction or just skip the auction .

Internationals pop up intermittently over here. One of the auctions I use has a set in its current list:

Box containing six Scott International albums with mint and used issues to the 1970s. Value in the earlier material. (many 100s)
Estimate £220

Of course, postage to the US would probably double that estimate!

Certainly more appealing than this lot:

Two boxes containing sixteen medium size lever binders stuffed with mostly used duplicated all world. Recommend the buyer extracts the 1% earlier useful material and bins the rest! (10,000s) Estimate £80

Geoff

Like most (all?) of you I would never have believed it woud sell at the asking price. Interestingly, even though I was watching it, ebay didn't show the collection as sold. I realize now that it had been relisted and I had never updated my watchlist.

It IS high. I wonder if it might have been bought by someone like this chap?

http://worldstampalbum.com/main.aspx

GEO---That is the best worldwide collection on the internet .You got to give Dr. Cheng Chang a lot of credit for the work he done to put that up.

Not that I have any way of knowing, but I would be surprised if it were bought by Dr. Cheng or anyone else with a large collection. The percentage of stamps that you need for your own collection would be very small, and then you would have the problem of selling the remainder. My guess is someone who wants to build on the collection or who wants to break it up for resale.

Do you think the story will be in Linn's?

I would be very surprised if it were. What I wish Linn's had covered was the almost complete worldwide 1840-2010 collection offered by private treaty by Harmer-Schau. If that didn't get Linn's attention, I don't know what would. Of course, it might be Linn's did try and the owner wanted to remain anonymous and not reveal any details of his/her collecting. Still, I think just a general article on how it is still possible to have an essentially complete collection of the (major varieties) of the world would have been of interest to most subscribers. But being an 1840-1940 worldwide collector, I might be a little bit biased.

Well, to no one's surprise, I'm sure, the seller has now relisted this, at $475,000. It's now a real steal at that price, so don't miss out this time around.

relisted ebay item 291394660174

Ha!

Yay! We are all vindicated.

I'm going to wait until they get to $325,000.

You shouldn't telegraph your bids like that. I'll just have to snatch it away from you at $327K.

Last week I "counted" a Big Blue collection and just for the fun of it I kept track of the count as I passed each country. I noticed that the count at the end of the Bs was almost exactly 1/5 of the total count, and the count after Japan was 1/2. So if I counted the As & Bs and multiplied by 5 I had the answer. I was wondering if anyone had any counting tips or short cuts they'd like to share.

Does anyone keep track of the selling prices of Big Blue collections by number of stamps?

Thanks,

Ken

Ken ---I got some records ,it is hard to do with any certainty . But you mean like this, a collection of 140,000 all different mounted in clean Internationals sold for $6,250.00 by Dr. Bob in his mail flyers in 2006 . This was at auction ,Dr Johnson sold his worldwide collection of 220,000 for $341,000 after the better stuff was sold as indivual lots , The 341,000 was the country collections in 2003.