What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Continued sorting a hoard of on-piece specimens gifted from an in-law's estate. The most recent batch involved Christmas stamps. These will probably get passed on to my daughter for an art project of some sort.

Since my last visit to the forum,which was a while ago, I have been researching, Philatelic websites,reading books & gaining all kinds of info on stamps & how they are made.I'm learning something new every day.

Purchased and cleaned up a nice leather (but musty) 16-side stock book that contained a random collection of stamps. The cover was adequately cleaned with a Lysol wipe-sheet. As for the interior, I placed sheets of newsprint between the leaves and sealed the whole thing in a plastic bag for a couple of days. I declare a 99% victory with respect to cleaning.

Now I have to find a new home for the stamps.

Just finished moving my 1840 - 1925 US collection from Mystic Heirloom pages to Steiner pages. I like these SOOO much better. Decided on 25% cotton, ivory, 32 lb. paper. Like the way it looks and I think it should be more than adequate. Don't know if I'll ever make the switch for the remaining nine albums of my US collection. A lot of work, to say nothing of the expense. Will keep the Heirloom album. Too expensive to replace.

I got two different collections off ebay and both required surgery to extricate the stamps from the mounts since sold on pages.

The ones on White Ace used mounts that were sealed on 3 sides (black paper backing so envelope style) but not sure the adhesive to page. They popped off the pages fairly easily but sometimes the adhesive migrated through the album page so page not good. The mounts were snug around stamps so had to cut mount.

The other lot used split back mounts and the prior ownwer moistened top and bottom so often had to cut as well. This really slows things down but did not see any issues with the stamps themselves.

Example - mount adhesive. I wonder if moisture was applied by a brush. The mounts appear to be Showgard since slightly translucent.

Local (annual) Stamp Fair, the first in a busy period for Fairs over the next month.
Did not buy any stamps as I am still sorting kiloware from June and burning as much as I put in albums.
But as I collect Irish postcards from what I call "The Golden Age" 1900-1922. These will all have British stamps and pre-independence, postmarks are in "English". So relieved to pick up a postcard from County Leitrim, the final and 32nd county. I now have about 175 from this period.
I picked up a cheap lot of 10 Comic cards from the same period. Only the first and last postmarks were visible and useful but you guessed it...with any pig in a poke, five were useless. So a lot that had potential to be great value was just kinda ok
Also picked up six cheap covers with slogan postmarks from 1930s. These lots are always good value. I change the displays in my albums regularly ...so always nice to have a supply of these authentically used pieces of mail A few years ago it turned out that one cover I bought for about 50pence was actually a First Day Cover and I have been offered £150 for it. The only time I ever struck lucky.
Finally part of the Exhibition was a display on PostCrossing. I am not really a fan but the display and conversation around it was excellent.

As part of my long-running sorting/disposing project, moved on to Egypt. Sorted through a heap of pre-1936 material to my satisfaction, then discovered I'd put more stock-sheets of this stuff inside the cover of my post-1936 Egyptian album. Consoled myself with the curd tart that my daughter brought back from a trip to Yorkshire.

Finally sat down to order the August, September, & early October USPS issues w/FDCs. (my wife keeps asking when will we have enough... never!!)

Eliqies, stamps are like potato chips, can't stop at just 1.

Caught up on all recent purchases, entering them in the database and properly storing them.

Finally caught up with the recent material....now for those 15 collections still waiting....sigh....

Yesterday, I went to our open air weekly stamp market and bought a cinderella after chatting a little with the friends.
I placed on my albums the latest prurchases (UK & Finland). Waiting for some new shipments to come.

Made a new page for my Scott National album to host the last of the "O"-series U.S. Official Mail stamps. Photo depicts the work in progress. Yes, the page is hand-drawn; my printer's platen isn't wide enough to accommodate these pages. In all, a very pleasant Sunday afternoon activity while keeping an eye on the Ravens-Browns game.

Over the last month, I have sorted through 96 retired APS circuit books that belong to the Knoxville Philatelic Society. These books have been in circulation and at the stamp club meetings for a long time so they are now going into the October stamp auction at the club meeting October 1 (tomorrow). I was able to pick out a bunch of stamps at a reasonable markdown from the original pricing in exchange for preparing the books (catalog total) for the sale. The US lot will catalog $3600+ and the foreign (might be several lots) will catalog $9000+. Lots of the stamps left in the books have minor to major faults, are less than VF and many mint are hinged. We are expecting the lots to go between 5-15% of catalog. If you saw my query about a forged Cyprus stamp #1, this is where I found it. It is going into the clubs Forgery Reference collection. Overall, a very enjoyable month.

I spent some time yesterday sorting a four pound lot of off paper worldwide I picked up a couple weeks ago. Initial sort will separate out the damaged and those needing a bath. The rest will go into a plastic tote to await sorting into countries.

I have also been working on organizing my electronic editions of Linn's Stamp News. Since I may lose free access to those soon, I wanted to make sure I grabbed the archived ones.

Dale

Working on some want lists this week, in anticipation of being at SESCAL on Saturday.