What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Mounted another 250 for Belgium and 200 for Hungary. Ordered 35 more packs of mounts. Need to finish what I have prepared for Hungary, Mexico, and Germany and then I think I can move on to Czechoslovakia or the D countries. I'm thinking to post a pic of my bookshelf with the approximately 23 binders each with about 100 pages containing what I have remounted.

Mounted Germany back of book from 1940 to 1949. Still need to mount the rest of Hungary, but at least all the mounts are cut, just need to wet them and affix to the pages.

Thought I would share my shelf space that holds my 23 1.5 inch binders (average 90 pages each) and 4 1 inch binders (average 50 pages each). These are all Steiner based pages that I have been working on since November. Unfortunately, I have 2 Jumbo International binders (and slipcovers) with new unused Part 2A and Part 2B pages sitting empty and likely will never use. You might notice my 2 volume National Album which is my original U.S. from 1978 and supplements through perhaps 1990. What you don't see are my 13 other International albums stuffed from 1940 to 1971, my China, France, and Germany specialty albums, and the 1000s of glassines holding so much more.

With so many extra U.S. stamps in this collection, I decided to do something fun with blocks, pairs and, singles. Here's the ARMY and NAVY Issues from 1937 and 1938. Some holes to fill, but I think I have used examples of what is missing and likely some extra plate blocks I might just break apart seeing as how plate blocks aren't worth very much. Cannot explain the tear in the ARMY 1c block of four, but it is how I found it when going through the collection.

So I decided the best way, at least for me, to get reacquainted with my collection was to spend the time to add each stamp I have to Stamp Manage so that I will have an electronic record of my collection. I'm scanning each stamp and then looking it up to understand what I have. I'm learning something new everyday. I've been at it about 5 weeks and have added about 1,250 stamps so far. I don't know exactly how many different stamps I have but I believe it is in excess of 25,000 in 15 black paged stock books. At this rate it's going to take me about 2 years. I'm really enjoying the process. I discovered today for example that I had three stamps from West Irian that I had previously mistakenly placed with my Indonesian stamps.

Instead of the letter D, I decided to tackle more of the French colonies and possessions, specifically those beginning with FRENCH in the catalogue. I printed pages and laid out ALL of the stamps I have for:

FRENCH COLONIES
FRENCH CONGO
FRENCH EQUATORIAL AFRICA
FRENCH GUIANA
FRENCH GUINEA
FRENCH INDIA
FRENCH OCEANIA (for when it was still called that)
FRENCH POLYNESIA
FRENCH SOUTHERN AND ANTARCTIC TERRITORY
FRENCH SUDAN
FRENCH WEST AFRICA

Looks like it will be a busy weekend cutting mounts!

I'm currently working my way through a large shoebox containing several hundred Finnish covers from 1928 which I'd forgotten I had.

PRE-BID on what turns out to be a Live auction. I thought I knew enough to read the fine print. The winner of the warm up doesn't even get a ribbon let alone win the Lot.

Follow up hours later. I honestly have no idea of the outcome here. I will have to keep an eye on my inbox to see if I won somehow. The 'live' portion was nearly 6 hours.

I'm still able to edit this so here goes. I put in a maximum bid and it won. Not any lower, the full amount which usually sounds fishy. I tried to follow live but it took hours and hours. I have to wonder what would have happened if I bid $100 less, but that is history now. I took the risk with a new place and hopefully the goods are as good as they look.

Today I finished going through the large Berlin lot that arrived a couple days ago. With this batch, I am fifty-one stamps away from being complete for Scott major numbers. At some point I will work on getting those remaining stamps.

Went through some remaindered approval books of Bolivia, Norway, and Uruguay. Spent most of the time cursing modern hinges and the slobbering collectors who use them.

Today's activity brings my collection to 13,797 stamps from 195 different entities.

Dale

Found another few hundred from Hungary just hanging around in another bin with a bunch of Great Britain still on paper. I swear I can do this country 3 times over. Hopefully there's a few I don't already have.

Done mounting the FRENCH I mentioned earlier. Was 983 stamps. Throw in another 225 from Hungary that wasn't mounted and it has been a busy week. From those additional few hundred Hungary that I found the other day, there were at least 10 that I didn't have, so pretty happy about that. It also made me finish the early stamps (1871 to 1916) which I was procrastinating on because of watermarks.

Next up: FRENCH MOROCCO

French Morocco done, 350+ stamps. Also, finally put a whole bunch of pages I had finished into binders. Not sure what country I will do next. If there's any suggestions, perhaps for a country rarely posted here (1840-1959 would be my range), I can do that and show some of the pages. Stay away from A-C, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, because I'm already done with those.

Scanning material.

I did read the release notes of a recent update to VueScan and noticed it added support for the individual control of the two lamps (can turn one off) for the Epsom V600. This supposed mimics the function of "Show Texture" in Epson Scam utility.

I spent some time after work today going through some packets of Germany, Grenada Grenadines, and Ryukyus. I hit a milestone of 15000 stamps in my collection from 205 different entities.

Dale

Nicholas how about a country from the Middle East such as Lebanon, Syria, or Saudi Arabia?

Shermae, sure, I actually have Syria out as I started laying out T countries and Syria is in the same catalog.