What Is Your Sorting Method?

I just went through my first "bulk" purchase of stamps. I bought 700 Canadian stamps on ebay to get started expanding my inherited collection. I have 40+ years of holes in the collection to fill and I figured it was a good place to start. When I got the stamps, I realized I had no plan of attack.
I ended up sorting them by value and placing them in envelopes with the denomination listed on the outside. Then, I grabbed a catalogue and started where I needed to start filling holes, 1973, and worked my way through the catalogue placing the stamps in a stock book in catalogue order. It took a couple of nights work but I've got them in order now and I just need to mount them, I guess.

I wonder what other methods are used around here. How do you do it?

I sort by country, as I am only looking for certain ones (Vanished nations). I then place those in envelopes to be used as trade bait ;). The countries I was looking for, I then pull out my reference material and album and start identifying and filling in gaps. Duplicates go in the aforementioned "trade bait".

Hi Slugore

See my post at: https://goscf.com/t/32811

Jerry B

Hi Slugore et al,
I inherited two large (think file-size) boxes of stamps etc. What I did over a period of about a week (in the evenings):
I started out sorting by "type:". Covers with stamps, post cards, postal stationery, other (like books, magazines, auction house literature, documents). As I did this, I put similar things in zip lock baggies. After I got that done, I went back into (for example) the covers with stamps bag(s) and started sorting them by the type of stamp (2 cent, 3 cent, etc). some of this I am not done with, especially postal cards (there's a bunch). I found myself getting caught up looking at the documents in the covers (mostly legal correspondence, some your everyday stuff like bills from the grocer etc). Needless to,say it's quite a task, but has certainly peaked my interest in pre-1930 u.s. Postage, revenues, and looking for things that might have historical significance.

I sort USA but its prob same idea, start with denomination gets your commemorative sorted well.

Hi!
When I first got back into the hobby I bought a number of bulk collections. Most all were off paper, many with hinge remnants. At a large desk surface, I did an alpha sort by country. There were some I could not identify and they went in a separate pile (thankfully it was a small pile).

Then I took it "letter by letter" and sorted by country. Eventually this was done and I began mounting stamps. For those countries that had only a handful of stamps, there was no more sorting to be done. As I collect only thru 1960, it is not terribly hard to figure out if the timeframe of the stamp.

For larger groups (i.e. Czech, Germany, Hungary, etc.) I would sort the stamps into commemoratives - vertical and horizontal, definitive, and then back of the book. Of course similar style stamps would be lumped together, as typically they end up in the same era.

Frankly, sorting stamps is work, and I soon realized I was better off buying albums - pulling what I needed and reselling what was left. Ha, I'm just about past that now, and country collections are what I'm now after.

I put them by denomination in stock book, stock book in French is "classeur" so a sorting book. This is more convenient than envelopes; you turn the pages of your album, look at the hole you want to fill, check the denomination and go in the stock book ...

If you want to place them in catalog order, putting them in dealer cards (102, 104 cards, etc.) first can be really helpful. Just label the card with the cat#, using a pencil so it's easy to re-use the same card again later. When they're are all identified and in a card it's super easy to shuffle them around and line them up in order.

I have been using the following:

1) Country (set aside in zip locks)
2) Pick country with largest amount
3) Sort by series (or what I think the series are)
4) Separate series into denominations/colours
5) Arrange by Scott #
6) Put in stock books for future disposal

NOT a perfect system by any means, but it keeps me busy.

I am new to this and I inherited my father's collection (plus some I'd put together over the years, but never sorted). Here is what I'm doing:

1) Separate those that need to be soaked off portions of envelope from those that do not (I "soak" between two well wrung out sponges); soak those that need it, flatten them, then add them to the next step
2) Grab a sorting board (mine has 9 rows on it) and start putting stamps from the piles of unsorted stamps onto the board by country (there are some countries that I know are likely to be two rows, so I leave two rows for them until the board starts getting full); I tend to leave a row for too hard to see or "I have no idea what country this could possibly be" (Japan and China took me a while to distinguish and there have been other stamps bereft of any indication of country)
3) Order within country by denomination
4) Search online catalogs by country and denomination and put stamps in glassine envelopes by year and series (labelled on the outside); also mark forgeries when I find them; I maliciously use a sharpie so that even I will be unlikely to use these envelopes again MUHAHA!

When I finally finish that part, I plan to continue:

5) Grab a country's worth of envelopes and figure out how I'm going to lay these out in a stock book (either by series, theme, or just by year)
6) Write labels that describe the stamps and add the Scott # (sometimes the Scott # is distinguished by stuff like perforation, shades of color that I cannot see, or watermarks which I cannot read, so I defer that until I reach this point when it may matter if there is any value to the stamp...if there is no value, I plan to just put a range of possible Scott numbers so that those who inherit my vast estate have something to do with their time)
7) Number the pages and put together a master reference on a DVD which also contains information about each stamp (whatever history I can cobble together)
8) Die chuckling about the poor child of mine who ends up with this pile :)

So far, I'm through about 5,000 stamps with lots of duplicates (darn German hyperinflation) and I know about countries that I never would have guessed existed (like Grenada Grenadines) and some that thought they did (like the armies of Russia's civil war), but really didn't.

Worst of all, I'm kind of hooked into the whole stamp thing that I thought I'd left behind me in my childhood, my father is getting to chuckle at me!

One word of caution: DO NOT TELL ANYONE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. They will hand you more stamps and you will feel obliged to go through them. This piling on borders on malicious. The sigh of relief when someone hands you a pile of unsorted stamps should be viewed as a cloud of noxious gas. Unless you like this stuff. Then it is fine.

One other word of caution: YOUR SPOUSE IS LIKELY TO THINK YOU HAVE GONE INSANE. My wife is tired of trying to identify colors. She worries about me losing what eyesight I have left. Of course, if you have no spouse or your spouse is equally hooked into this bizarre life style then this word of caution does not apply.

Final word of caution: It turns out that most people don't care that you can identify the difference between Type I and Type II of a particular stamp by using a microscope to count the number of lines in the left edge of a ribbon. If you try to tell them, they yawn and quietly suggest that you move onto another topic (which turns out is NOT something about perfins). Beware. You have been warned.

When I have a kiloware, I put them all in my stockbook without sorting them. I try to detect the duplicates and allocate them a page. After I ID one stamp and enter info in my listing (Excel). Then I hinge it in my album. The sorting is the album and that's it that's all. Daniel

Artful Hinger,

Dealer cards? Can you post an example pic of one or a link to where to purchase?

Thanks,

Dave

This is the sort of thing I use, and I think this is what Artful has in mind

http://www.worldstamps.co.uk/Stock_..._157_x_112mm

Sounds like you work with 200 or maybe 2,000 stamps. How do you handle 250,000 or 600,000 stamps ? I wanted to see how someone else handles a large inventory .Don't tell me plastic bags or tubs ,I am talking better stamps .

Thanks Geoff

floortrader
You surely know that some long time WW collector end up specializing. I had countries collections and thematics too. The shift may take long but I think about it sometime. Choices are infinite...