How To Build A (Almost) Complete Worldwide Collection At No Cost

I wanted to highlight an article I recently read in a back issue of American Philatelist (Feb 2009; pp. 1044-1048) called "Selling Stamps Can Increase Your Collection" written by Forrest H. Blanding. In the article, Mr. Blanding describes his experiences during 50 years as a worldwide stamp collector and dealer. This is somewhat reminiscent of a much abbreviated Nassau Street by Pat Herst, Jr. But the interesting main point of Mr. Blanding's article was how he was able to build an almost complete, mostly mint, worldwide collection at no net cost to him over his 50-year career as a stamp dealer.


Like many stamp collectors, Mr. Blanding began collecting stamps at the age of 8 and had built up a sizable world collection of 25,000 different stamps by the time he finished high school in 1935. Also like many of us, his collection remained dormant during his college and early married years, but began to buy collections and sell his duplicates through the mail after World War II. He continued buying large collections, picking the best stamps out for his collection, and selling the rest. Here's how Mr. Blanding described his collection in the article:

"My collection included issues only to 1975…The final collection included 98 percent of all major world stamps listed up to 1975 in the Scott Catalogues — more than 200,000 different stamps, all in mint or unused condition except for some high-priced nineteenth-century issues. It filled to near completion fifty bulging volumes of the Scott International series. It included the best copies from all the collections I had purchased over the years, so the stamp condition was usually exceptional on all but some of the early values. "

By 1995, approaching age 80 and not having the space for his large collection in the retirement home he was moving into, he decided to sell all his stamps. Incredibly, Mr. Blanding went on to live another 17 years after selling his collection, passing away in 2014 at the age of 97.

He never did say how much he sold the collection for, but he gave a clue at the end of the article by his statement, "…my five grandchildren obtained their university or other needed graduate education costs from that collection. It continues to contribute to our family today."

*** Edited by Staff to remove YELLING. All capital letters is the internet version of yelling. Please don't do it in titles or posts. ***

The problem with stories like this ,is the lack of detail and it leaves too much to speculation and wild guesses to what the guy really had and how it was sold. The idea it didn't cost anything is dumb ,he plowed the profits from his stamp sales and business into his own collection.

That was in 1995, thinks have change since that time.

Chris - I found the story very fascinating, thanks for sharing

floortrader: This was just a summary of a full article that was published in AP. Since back issues of AP are only available to APS members, I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to link to the full article or provide the full text of the article here. This was why I gave the citation to the full article for anyone who wants to go read the details (if they are APS members or otherwise have access to the AP magazine. My intent was just to summarize the article in order to covey the story, not as a "how to" guide.





So the "at no cost" in the title was a bit of a "hook" to draw readers in to read the post. You will notice that in the first paragraph, I did specify "at no net cost to him" which is true.




area66: Yes, you are right, this was in the 50 years after WWII mostly before the days of ebay and the Internet.

Moderator: sorry for the capitalization in the title. It was certainly not meant to be "yelling" I just happened to put the title in all caps when I wrote it in Word to distinguish the title from the body of the text, and that was inadvertiantly copied over when I posted it. Sorry, again it was not my intention for it to be seen as "yelling"

Thanks Blaamand! That was my only goal - to covey an interesting story.

Very interesting article, Chris. I shared this with some of my friends as well and they too liked it.
Thanks for sharing.

Chris, I had completely forgotten about this article. Thanks for the reminder. And for anyone who goes looking, it is in the Nov 2009 (rather than Feb) American Philatelist.

If the guy was a stamp dealer, then his profits were no different than if he owned some other business or if he made a salary working for someone else. The idea that his collection cost him nothing is absurd. He spent the money he earned as a dealer to buy his collection, same as the rest of us spend our salaries on our collections.

When you get right down to it, a whole bunch of us do this...at least in theory. Buy a collection, take what you need, and sell on the balance. (I'm not any good at it, because I can rarely bring myself to sell anything.)

This was harder to do before the internet, because us non-dealers didn't have ready markets to efficiently move middling collections, other than consigning to local auctions. All that has changed.

When I sold stamp collections it never paid for graduate studies but oh yes it paid for beers. Enjoy!

I wrote about this before on a few different chat boards . The glory days of being a worldwide collector was the 1980's and 1990's .
Back in the 80's and 90's you can go to any of the bigger stamp auction firms around the country and fill up the back of a SUV [ I had a big K-5 Chevy Blazer] for a few hundred dollars. Looking back at it now it was just crazy to think what you could buy with very little bidding effort . Albums and Binders were free at the firms and sets of the Blue Internationals came free if you just purchased the stamps inside . This wasn't kilo material or bundles of 100 like kind of stamps ,this was mounted collections at a fraction of purchase cost .
THAT ALL CHANGED WITH ebay . After 2003 ,then came the ebayer sellers who priced everything much higher and many times I would come home from stamp auctions and complain to my wife that collections and large lots were ridiculous in price and they were destroying my market for purchasing stamps and I quit being a seller thru Linn ads . I think it was close to 3,000 to 3,500 mixture lots that I sold .

I agree with eyeonwall; there is no magic or epiphany in being a stamp dealer and making money to then build a personal collection. I also agree with floortrader; doing this pre-eBay was vastly different than doing it today.
Don

Members of our club were just talking about the benefits of being part of APS. One of which is being able to access great articles like this one. It sheds a bit more light and brings up new questions. Bottom line here is that it takes money to make money. He spent $200 on a collection in the 1950's (a princely sum in those days) He did some things that assured good selling prices. He only collected mint and had many high values. Pictured with his article were the $1-$4 mint Canada Jubilee stamps he once owned. He did buy during the times floortrader spoke about. A couple mysteries. He said he had 200K different stamps housed in Big Blue through 1975. I'm not sure they would hold that many stamps. He must have supplemented it somehow. He did say that one regret he had was not taking photos of his better stamps to remember them.