I Have To Get Serious About Liquidating Dad's Collection...

Makes good sense Artful. Thanks.

You always have the choice of selling part of it and keeping part of it to work on.

Unfortunately UN used to be very popular (read tons of it was saved) and now it is very unpopular, so it will sell very low (especially the First Day Covers).

The US cover at the left of the US pile with the 2c red stamp and Flag at left looks interesting.

Why don't you pick off small pieces you are sure you want to sell. You mentioned UN and Disney. Why not start there. For UN you could separate the stamps from the first day covers. Research what the going prices are for the collections on ebay and elsewhere. If you can live with that estimate of sale prices, then sell these pieces.

This will get your feet wet selling of the less interesting parts. Then move on to the other bits.

Yeah, the UN stuff is apparently worthless. Bad part is that the off cover stamps are almost all there,
and are all unused. I figured face value once, and it was several hundred dollars. Over $400 if memory
serves.... Maybe twice that. I forgot the amount, but it was scary high.

Dad bought all this from Mystic too, paying inflated prices that took advantage of his age, health, and
lack of internet or other resources to tell him he was being fleeced.

I tried to get my daughter into stamps, and kinda promised her the Disney collection.
She's becoming a teen now, and it's likely she won't remember, or care, but that is
one part I am not in a hurry to get rid of.

As for ME retaining any, that won't work. I love the whole thing! It's just so
funky, and diverse... I couldn't pick one thing to cull out. I love it all!
I must disconnect cold turkey.

No joke, there are thousands "interesting" items! Many aren't worth much, but they are just too
"interesting" to let go! This collection is sooooooo diverse and interesting, I don't even want
to give it up. It is just a shame that I have to assume it won't survive my passing. I'd keep it.

I thought this might be the cover you noticed, but after checking, it's not.
I don't have that exact one uploaded to the site.

Love this:
Crash cover.
Plane went down in Pensacola Bay, 1978.
4 fatalities, many critical injuries.
Delivered to my Grandfather at his business.
I have compiled many pics, and the FAA crash report.
These are the only pics I have on site....



More:

'worth'?

Onesy-twosy selling gets you more cash for more work.

A lock-stock-and-barrel single sale gets you less cash for less work.

You should not trap yourself into valuing the collection at its stamp-by-stamp yield if you are not willing to do all that work, and you should not trap yourself into thinking that you have destroyed value if you load one truck and be done with it.

These are two very different options, with very different demands on your temporal & emotional resources. (The latter refers to the fact that you may be letting go of your father, not just his stamps.)

You've gotten some very good advice here - Artful & Rileysan come to mind - on pieces that might be split off to do better on their own.

I would add two principles:

1) Do not mix apples & oranges. I recently inspected an auction lot that included hundreds of 19th Century US Postal Cards and hundreds of 20th Century US First Day Covers. Who was supposed to bid aggressively on this lot? The person who wanted the postal cards, and was willing to sell-off the FDCs? Or his Bizarro World anti-matter twin?

2) Do not put your time into trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. The UN FDCs are next to worthless. Taking the stamps off of them will cost you hours & hours of mind-numbing work that will ... what? turn two pennies per cover into three pennies per stamp? Leave that to the buyer, if you can find one ;)

[tangential_anecdote]

I've bought onesy-twosy, and I've bought lots. The Plan was to parse each lot for what I needed, and sell the rest back. Uh-oh. Now what I've got is a nice pile of parsed lots. I have yet to master the art of (what the museums call) de-accessioning.

[/tangential_anecdote]

Cheers,

/s/ ikeypikey

I understand those values are not the same...
I was painting a picture of what I was up against, and I guess it sounded that way.

Never suggested doing anything like that?
Not sure where that came from. The collection is made up of many things, including the FDCs,
many postally used UN cover, and the MINT stamps that fill the album from UN #1 to somewhere
in the 2000s. No need to have used stamps when the album is filled with MINT. Several hundreds
of dollars of MINT. The other historic cover and FDCs are a subset. IMO, stamps are worth more
on cover anyway. I'd never take stamps off cover. I can't think of any worth more off cover. ???

If it really is a burden, and it might end up in landfill - why not just flog the lot to a dealer, for whatever you can get?

These are all tough decisions. Regardless of what your father paid for it, it must have given him hours and hours of pleasure. You can't measure that !

As others have said, break it up into smaller chunks. Sell them one by one on ebay, from the category you are least interested in upward. See how it goes. Hopefully they will end up in hands of other collectors who can have hours and hours of fun as well. As you go forward perhaps you'll come to the conclusion that you really would like to keep a part of it in memory of your Dad.

That would be great. We can always use more stamp collectors. Sounds like you have the bug, don't fight it.

You are right: you never did suggest anything like that.

OTOH: https://goscf.com/t/43504&whichpage=2#372678 ... by HungaryForStamps




It seems that I misread 'separate' as 'soak off' ... my apologies to all concerned.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I could not agree more. The overall tone/mood of this thread seems rather strange to me. "My Dad left me his collection of valuable stuff, but I feel like he did me wrong by not making it easier to find every microgram of value in it."

Wish my parents had left me anything of value- I certainly would not have considered it a burden.

.

That isn't quite what I meant. I meant to say that if the result of not selling it was that it may get thrown away, then it's better to get something for it now - even if it's a modest amount. Isn't that preferable to getting nothing and the whole lot being sent to landfill - particularly if the very ownership of it is causing stress. I say, take an offer and accept that it's worth whatever you can sell it for - no more and no less than that.