Inherited Collection For Sale

Hi Everyone,

My wife recently inherited her father's stamp collection upon his death. He began collecting at age 12 and passed at 78. There are boxes and boxes full of stamps. Some catalogued but most not. Much of the stamps are loose in large envelopes.

What is the best way for us to sell all of these stamps? We are not collectors and have absolutely no idea of the value. How do we find someone to assist with this that is trustworthy and know they will provide us with the true value of the collection?

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Shawn

See if there is a stamp club near you. If so, take a sample of the collection to a meeting and get some quick opinion on what you may have. Good luck

Welcome to the forum.

There have been plenty of posts like this in the past. Use the Search function and you'll find more information.

In the meantime, others will probably respond.

Nugget99, you can find more info on this if you follow Hungary's advice. Also, there is a lot of info on http://stamps.org including a list of stampclubs in your area.

Peter

Thanks for the quick responses and while I appreciate the advice I can honestly say that neither my wife nor I possess the time or patience to sit with a guide and try and look up what could be 10,000 loose stamps. That said, I know we are taking a chance trying to sell the lot with no knowledge of what we have.

Are there stamp auction services available? I will also look up local clubs.

Thanks again.

nugget99 -

Is this primarily a world-wide (multiple countries) collection or just a single country (i.e. USA, Germany, etc.

Are there any albums with mounted stamps?

Depending upon where the collection is located, there are several well-known stamp dealers in the USA (i.e. Mystic Stamp in NY, Bob Friedmen & Sons in Chicago and south Florida, Edward Younger Co. in CT) who are always looking to add to their inventories. Some will even come to you if the collection sounds interesting to them.

From your description, it sounds as if this is an "accumulation" - a mass of stamps rather than an organised collection. Lots like this tend to end up in the latter stages of auctions and sell for two figure sums. As others have said, a stamp club would be a good way of finding out if there's anything there to take it above that level.

Thanks for the response Geoff. A lot of the collection is in books/collections including plate "blocks" from 1902. Some are complete and some are not. The books are all US and the loose were stamps he accumulated but was not able to get into collections.

Ah, this sounds much better!

You could scan a few pages of the oldest material and post the images here (e.g., 19th century US, if any). Or you could summarize the books/collections and perhaps we can suggest what to scan.