A couple weeks ago I had an idea. My Sixbit auction software keeps all my
ebay sales in a database which I can access and analyze so I thought I'd look at a few collections and make a list of the top selling countries. I could use this list as a tool when I evaluate collections for purchase. I decided to review the data from 6 collections I've sold in the last couple years.
Collection 1
This was a Scott International Vol I collection in 3 volumes. It contained over 32,000 stamps making it over 90% complete. The collector who built this collection collected to the album and there were no "extras", it is by far the best collection I have sold. I sold this collection on consignment. There is detailed information regarding this collection on jkblues blog ;
http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.co...d-index.html Lets look at the data.
Collection 2
This was an old Scott International collection thru 1928 that had been rebound into 2 volumes and this collector did not include any extras either. There were about 23,000 stamps which is approximately 85% full. I bought this collection from Dutch Country auctions.
Collection 3
This was a 1943 Bound Scott International Vol I. This collection was interesting in that the early stamps were stronger than the later stamps. I bought this on
ebay.
Collection 4
This collection is a Scott Volume I collection in 2 volumes. The key feature of this collection were the many pages of extra stamps that wouldn't fit in the spaces provided by Scott. These extras were neatly mounted on pages. I got this collection from Dutch Country Auctions.
Collection 5
This was another Scott Volume I collection in 2 volumes which contained 28,000 stamps. The remarkable thing about this collection was that it somehow contained the most inexpensive 28,000 stamps possible. I bought this collection on
ebay.
Collection 6
This Scott Volume I collection had an owner catalog value of $37,000, I bought this from Dutch Country.
There is a lot of information in the above charts, but you can probably see my problem. I envisioned a common set of 8-10 countries would be on every list however the only country that is on all 6 lists is France with Great Britain, Italy and China on 5 lists. After that the consensus peters out.
I always like to do an analysis and come up with a surprise and this was a surprise for me. However when you think of the diversity of collecting interests, the randomness of stamp availability and the vagaries of
ebay auction results maybe it's not so surprising.
I'm going to tease out the data for British and French colonies and add that to the analysis in a couple days.
Posted 02/03/2017 9:16 pm
