Amazing Lifetime Collection!

We can only dream of having the time and money to amass such a collection!


http://www.ebay.com/itm/NobleSpirit...em43d2856cd7

Wow! Plenty of premium stamps. But no US? I wonder if that sort of collection can actually be sold intact or only broken up.

The owner spent thousands upon thousands for stamps, and then used the cheapest possible embossed labels on the spines of the binders, which really detracts from the appearance. Binders with spines pre-printed with the name of one country were even reused and different labels stuck over them.

270 binders, 2700 pounds estimated weight. This seems like a white elephant that only a handful of collectors, a foundation or institution, or a government entity could accommodate, in terms of secure storage, insurance, or even time to enjoy and use. It's been listed and/or re-listed since at least early November. It will probably be broken up eventually. Perhaps the owner or his/her heirs requested an attempt at a single consignment sale.

Exactly,the heirs requested a single consignment. Cash out in one shot.

Amazing collection. I can't imagine the time and effort involved in building a worldwide collection of this size. I spend hours and hours just working on my US collection and that alone spans about 40 albums.

Shame it will likely be broken up as I agree only a major stamp dealer etc would consider such a purchase.

It is certainly an epic collection and I'd need to move house if ever I could afford to buy it. The only trouble is, where do you start when you want to fill the gaps? It would take another $500,000 to change the collection from something good to something outstanding. Either that or sell off the countries you don't want and use the proceeds to specialise. Anyone lend me a few quid to back up a decent bid...??

Yep, even if money weren't an object I don't know if I'd buy it. Why? Because most of the fun for me is in the actual building of the collection - the hunting for them, the mounting, seeing the collection grow and progress. Getting a mostly complete WW collection in one fell swoop would remove all of that from the equation. Sure, they would be nice to look at and I'd be sure to do that, but what then? The stamps that are missing are likely to be very hard to find and/or very expensive.

My guess is that if I bought the whole thing that I'd take the necessary time to look through all of them, but then after that initial viewing, 90% of it would probably never (or rarely) be looked at again and I'd end up turning to some arcane specialty.

Artful

Yes - for one of their marriages, Liz Taylor bought Richard Burton a complete set of around 1000 Everyman's Library books (Modern Library is the nearest US equivalent). Apparently he was furious because his pleasure in poking around second-hand bookshops looking for missing volumes had been ended at a stroke!

Geoff

No disparagement to the collector, as that looks like it was years of fun in the making, and I certainly wish the best for the heirs, but...

There is no good reason not to part that out. The only reasons I see for selling it as one lot are sentimentality or the wish for one big strike, and I think both of those are misplaced.

It is not complete enough to warrant keeping it together, and it appears to be missing many higher value stamps and sets that would let a serious collector fill in tough spaces. In many of the countries, a number of the high-value or uncommon spaces are blank. That's going to make it difficult for the dealer to break it out into country lots that will get top dollar. The fact that the newer stuff seems to be hinged will also cause some buyers fits.

Rough back of the envelope guessing, I think if you spent $200,000 on it and were willing to invest two years, you could part it out and you might double your money. Might not.

Still, it would have been neat to build it.

Geoff, can you imagine Leonardo Caprio browsing the second-hand bookshops these days looking for that elusive "Everyman" volume? I must admit I have browsed for these volumes since my early 20s and some are indeed elusive :-)

It is unfortunate that individual country albums can't be sold. There would certainly be a better chance of sales.

It looks like a great collection from what can be seen online. Unless mistaken, it looks like some of the new material has been hinge mounted.

I'd imagine that you'll see this collection in an auction house later this year. I'm not sure if listing it on ebay is an attempt to sell or simply an attention getter. Even though there is free shipping, can you imagine the logistics of getting the product to a buyer ?

Tim
Well, I haven't seen Lenny in any dusty bookshop basements. Becoming harder to find second-hand bookshops to browse in these dats. As with stamp shops, they're a vanishing breed. So my tetirement project of picking up EL books may have to be abandoned!
Regards.
Geoff

Sorry guys --------It is not worth that price and no serious dealer would be in the market for any thing near that price .The person who wrote that advertisement is a ebay lot describer not a philatelist . It was not examined by a stamp expert or described correctly .
First ---having $1,000 stamps included is way too low ,it needs $10,000 stamps with certificates .
Second -----My collection would blow that one away just on catalog value away in a minute ,nobody buys on catalog value alone ,you can do the catalog value game with just Kiloware mixtures and huge lot purchases at major auctions ----so catalog value means nothing to major buyers of collections .
Third ----A major missing part is the word ------ALL DIFFERENT ,yes how many all different stamps ,does it contain full pages of the same stamp ?-----you are going to get repeat collections in that number of volumes ,this whole package can be five or more worldwide collections mounted on the same selves ,notice nowhere is this a single worldwide collection ---serious note ----if your counting binders ,my collection is larger -----but mine includes my childhood starter albums ,my teenager collection ,all my speciality albums ,my duplicates are mounted in three spare International sets .....numbers of binders mean nothing .
That collection if sold as one unit and contains all common material will go for 1% to 1 1/2% of catalog ,my offer after review would be $40,000 to $60,000 with me hoping to spend a year selling it in pieces and double my money with a few thousand stamps for my own collection .

Floortrader it sounds like you have a very impressive collection. As for me I would love to buy this collection for $60,000 and I suspect there would be a lot of other people ahead of me. I would happily sell it on ebay and I wouldn't care if there were several WW collections included, they would all sell. The material that is shown in the pictures is very clean and marketable. The 1 thing I noticed is that there were very few 1st pages shown. In almost every case the pictures started on the 2nd or 3rd page of the country which makes me wonder a bit. Regardless it is a very pretty collection.