What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

I bought a very nice Great Britain collection a few years ago and have been slowly but surely filling in as many of the empty spaces as I could afford, but a couple of weeks ago as I was perusing a page of the early Queen Victoria issues, I noticed that the stamp in the space for SG 87, the ninepence straw colored stamp from 1862, was actually SG 98, the ninepence straw stamp from 1865, and since the stamp in the space for SG 98 was correctly mounted, I thus had two copies of 98, but no 87. It's fairly easy to confuse the two, the designs are very similar, with the main differentiating characteristic being larger corner check letters on the later issue. I therefore set out to buy a copy of 87, and bid on and won one, a stamp with a nice wing margin, clean perfs (albeit cut into the design a bit on the left side), reasonably visible face on QV, legible number cancel and quite good color, this issue tends to fade badly, and at a decent price that I was pleased with.

"Attended" a couple of philatelic society meetings by ZOOM. Both from a long way away and which I could never have got to in person.

ZOOM philately is one of the few positives to come out of this pandemic.

AQ

I finally got around to putting away, file, sort, and update my U.S. Plate block collection.

Ive been moving stamps from my stock book to my album. Nothing really exciting to report.

Visit to Dublin on Thursday. Got some recent new issues including Women in Sport, probably the best stamps in recent years.
As always brought home a set of mint stamps and posted the others to myself.
All arrived yesterday (Saturda

I've laid out classic Egypt (mostly mounted), Greece, and Finland. Need to print pages for Haiti, Honduras, and Dominican Republic. Received 12 more packs of mounts in the mail today, so that should get me through quite a bit. I still do need to mount countries I laid out late last year, e.g. Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain, but ran out of empty glassines for duplicates. Laying out more countries replenishes my available glassines.

I have been mounting German stamps to Steiner pages. Most have come from a mix of WW stamps I like to purchase every so often from an ebayer I like. I get the mixes for 1 to 2 cents a stamp. I have also been sorting the mix and integrating into my other country pages and saving the duplicates for trades. Here are a few of many pages. Next I will start to work on the Third Reich Semi-postal stamps.

For the last few days I've been steadily working through a large packet of Sweden. I take a small pile out of the bag and work through them, identifying each and adding them to my database. I've been setting the earlier stuff and some of the definitive series aside. I'll go through those once I get the more modern stuff wrapped up. I should have the bulk of them done this weekend.

I had forgotten how relaxing it can be to go through a pile of stamps. It helps that modern Swedish stamps are pretty easy to identify.

I've also added to my reference library over the last couple days:

2021 Scott Catalogue Volumes 6 A/B
2016 Sakura Catalogue
2017/2018 Austria Netto Spezialkatalog

I've been wanting to get a copy of the ANK for a while and if I hadn't found a copy on ebay probably would have purchased a brand new one from a seller in Europe. The Sakura was from the same seller and was a buck plus postage. Hard to say no to that.

Dale

I finished working through the Sweden lot I recently purchased. In all, I added over 2400 stamps to my collection. Over the next few days I'll be working through an envelope of the duplicates from this lot as well as several others that I hadn't gotten to yet.

Once that's done it'll be time to sit for a while and figure out where this collection is going to take me.

Dale

I have been busy. I bought a mixed box lot (albums, stockbooks, glassines, pages full of stamps). I have only glanced at it but it has some US Revenues, Officials, and a few pages of pre-1920 stamps, a handwritten album of United Nations related issues from around the world and a bunch of other stuff. The reason it is untouched is that I also have a box of stock pages filled with stamps, with Scott numbers, from a international collection. These are the most common stamps but I have pulled 6 stock pages of stamps that I do not have in my collection and still have 2/3 of the box to work through. The best buy recently is a Davo Iceland album and a Iceland collection to get a good start filling it. All of my Iceland is now in the album. Most of these purchases were at Knoxpex Stamp show earlier this month. Small shows still have a place on my calendar.

I am back working part time as a consultant so my stamping time has reduced a little but in a lull since have not have that many purchases.

Laid out classic Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Honduras. Still need to mount these and finsh up mounting Egypt, Greece, and Finland. And I still have all those S countries I prepared before. After that, I will be done with phase 1, less South America for which I am considering an experiment with AlbumEasy.

I attended a small stamp show. Only 4 dealers. in the past it has been very busy but today the choice was very limited and several of the regular dealers have stopped attending this venue.

I am saving a lot of money during my hiatus. I won't last though.

Jack Kelley

Sorted through some modern US Kiloware. Mostly from 1995-2010. I really don't have many stamps
from these years so many will make my album.