Any Good Tips For Starting An Italy Collection?

Mike, Sandafayre (one of the UK houses) usually has good quantities of Italian stamps. It's not my speciality at all, but they regularly carry Italian, states, colonies, republican issues, and others plus Fiume and Trieste. I must admit to being tempted to buy once or twice.

Hi Mike

I have just finished sorting and mounting Italy if you send me an email I will happily send you some of my spares. May fill some of your holes.

Dianne

I will give you the same advice I give anyone starting a new collection - first spend a few weeks making a virtual collection by putting together sheets of pictures of each stamp taken from auction and sale sites. Add a catalogue number and the asking price. At any rate do it for the whole of the pre 1950 period. (After that it's mostly junk anyway.)That way when you start buying real bits of paper you will have a good idea of what the differences are between similar sets, what to look out for, what roughly a copy can be bought for, which issues are heavily forged/faked etc.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I've pretty much finished mounting everything up to 1960. Have a small box of 1961 and up I'll get to soon.

I've noticed some pretty decent catalog values on some 1920-1950 stamps that to me, seem like common commems. Why is there such a difference in pricing on these compared to "similar" US issues from same era? I'm just used to the US stamps being worthless LOL

particularly, these:

Also, quite a few stamps seem to have a higher used value than unused. Like the 2.50l orange stamp above.

Most of these stamps came from a large collection I purchased a few years ago at a yard sale. There were a lot still on piece and it seems everything was sent to this guy via express. I must have about 50 of the earlier 2.50l express stamp still on piece and another 30+ loose that had been soaked off. It was owned by well to do Austrian who emigrated to the US in the 1920s or so

Likely it's because of combination of short usage and sales period + limited usage for the high values.

The 1932 stamps you show were valid for less than two years, and the 1949 stamp was valid for just few months.

-k-

Thanks scb - that makes sense

why would the 100L 1949 stamp be only valid for a few months though?

Actually short usage periods (usually till the end of following year) apply for all Italian commemorative stamps up to end of 1966. If I had to make a wild guess about the reasons of this postal policy, then my money would be on the instability of the Italian Lire.

So I'd say a proper 'in-period' cancel is very important if collecting used specimens (and especially when used is valued much higher than mint).

But this is just rambling of a worldwide collector. Specialists likely know better ;)

-k-

Very nice collection, Mike.
You printed the pages in cream coloured paper?
Looks beautiful.

Mike, can you please upload a photo to the whole album so that we can see how the entire pages and album look?
I'm deciding whether to mount my Greece collection in Steiner A4 pages, or make my own pages in 29x29 format.
Thank you very much.

If you´re interested in Italy, as far as I know, the definitive italian serie, the siracusan head, has lots of variants and it´s somehow like the machins in the UK.

Hi Igrodi -thanks

Yes, they are cream 65lb card stock I bought at Staples.

Here's an entire page - I crop inside the border for my site but this is a full version:



I'm really impressed with the Steiner pages. This is the first time I've really loaded some up with stamps. I used to prefer having pictures on the pages like the pre-printed albums but once you have a bunch of stamps mounted, they do look really nice.

I hand number each page and name the file that number so when I add or replace a stamp and rescan, I can just overwrite the old one with the new one

thanks

Thank you!