Dad's Fdi Collection

Hello Stamp ppl. First post here, so if I break any rules, please let me know what I can't and cannot say or post here. If I've posted in the wrong forum, let me know.

I am not a collector, but rather an heir of a small collection of 16 binders that have a bunch of FDI envelopes. I wanted to come here to see if this small collection has any value or not. See my pictures below. I have some more details if someone wants them. Mots likley not going to sell them, but I guess that depends on the value of these.

Maybe someone can give me an approx value of this set. the range is various, most all close to mint. Various topics and dates. These are just some of the images, obviously there is much more.

Let me know what you think?

FDI-con, welcome to this forum. Looking at your pictures, I can imagine how much pleasure your father must have had with these issues.
Your question is a hard one, mainly because the FDC's cover such a long period. There are most likely some sought after covers in there, but the vast majority sells for around a dollar.
Before you get too disappointed may I suggest you check E-bay. They list some 150.000 First Day Covers, and some bring a few dollars!`

Peter

Without seeing them all, I would put their value sold one at a time on ebay at a dollar or two. Sold in bulk to a dealer -- and I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't find a dealer to take them because it appears that the bulk of them are Artcraft, which are extremely common -- you'd be lucky to get a tenth of that.

You say there is more, but if it is more of the same (i.e. very common( then the previous generalization applies. Count them up, value them at a nickel to a dime each, and you've got the most I could see a dealer paying for them. If you took the time to put them on ebay at a starting bid of $0.01 with low or (better) free shipping, you'd do better, but only slowly, over time, and you might not consider it worth the effort.

thank you for your replies! Ya what I meant when I said obviously there is much more, is that pics 1 and 2 are separate. In other words, the binders shown in pic 1 was in addition to pic 2. Pic 2 wasn't showing the whole collection, but pics do. At anyrate, I can see it may not be worth the effort to sell them one a time on ebay, I can see that taking a century of time and effort. If anyone would like more pics, I can display more of them as well. TIA

Those White Ace Cover Albums with Dust Covers could potentially be worth more than the contents (assuming the FDCs are all in the 1960s through 1990s range.) At last check, new White Ace Cover Albums and Dust Covers were going for $37.80 and $9.25 respectively. I'd venture to guess that if you offered a completely filled "album" with 100 FDCs, plus the album itself and dust cover, you'd realize more value than just the covers alone. Of course, there's the added weight of the albums, which impacts shipping costs that will need to be factored in.

As the others have said the commercial value is negligible and the $1 per first day cover or perhaps $2 for a handful is the full retail value if you were to sell them on ebay one at a time. Your time to sell them and mail them out would bring the value down to very little if you put a value on your personal time. On the other hand it looks like your father must have had a lot of fun collecting these and while he would have spent much more on collecting them he would have received more than his investment in back in fun. My suggestion is that you just keep them as a rememberance of your father.

To all of you who have replied. Thank you very much. :) You all seem very knowledgeable and quite genuine in your replies. Ya, for $1 each sold one at a time on ebay, ehhh...that's not going to happen. I did run across a whole other tub(like the one shown in picture 2) of the same last night while going through things. Think there maybe 25 or so binders of these precious items. It's amazing that the binders maybe worth more than the items they are trying to preserve @wt1. I had no idea. Interesting.

The thing with post-WW2 US postage stamps is that they were printed not just in the millions, but in the tens and hundreds of millions and were distributed all over the country. If you find ones that are mint never used anyone can go online and buy them wholesale for a percentage of their face value - usually in the 70 percent to 90 percent of their face value and you can still used them to pay postage so in theory there is an instant profit to buying them. The catch is that it takes time to put together enough of them to make the exact postage rate for today's mail and for most people the time to do it is money and makes this practice actually cost more than buying a new Forever stamp at your local post office. Used examples of post WW2 stamps typically go for a few pennies if you buy them wholesale or in quantity. On these post-WW2 stamps when you see dealers asking for higher prices than what I am describing it is because you are paying for the dealers' time and costs to stock these stamps and pay the overhead costs of their business rather than the actual value of the individual stamps. Exceptions exist but they are few and far between.

On First Day Covers (FDC) the situation is pretty much the same as there were (and to a lesser extent today still are) many retail companies that manufacture FDCs to sell to their customers. Artcraft, which you will note on many of yours, is perhaps the biggest example and so their FDCs are the most common of them all. These companies marketed their FDCs with the implied hope that a person would be investing their money in a future collectable and large numbers of people were enticed into buying them. There are many companies that used this marketing strategy back then and still do today, not only in FDCs but in all sorts of collectables.

In your dad's large accumulation of FDCs - you might want to rummage through them and see if there are any from the 1930s or earlier. Those are a mixed bag of values, but there tend to some that do have more value than the value of the time to sell them, and some of them can be significantly more.

Again, my encouragement would be to keep your dad's FDC accumulation as a memory of him, but if you really do want to just sell them my suggestion is to sell the books of them individually or in small groupings of similar dates or FDC makers, with perhaps something like 100 FDCs in each lot. Take some clear, sharply focussed photos and put them on ebay with a starting bid of 99 cents and set a shipping cost of what it will cost you to mail them by ordinary US Mail in a large padded envelope or small box - do not try to make a profit on "shipping and handling" as that really turns off many potential bidders.