Are Duplicates Worth Collecting?

I was looking thru a large collection of France and Italy recently. I was considering buying it.
I was put off by the large amount of duplication. There seemed little point in buying 2,000 stamps when (say) 1,000 were duplicate and several copies of some stamps.
Maybe I am naive but I always assumed that collecting was about getting one copy of a stamp.
Anything more....well surely that goes into the "duplicate" box to be exchanged or traded at a later date. In 90% of cases a duplicate is worthless (except for trade) so I dont see the point in amassing a collection of duplicates.
For me ....the golden rule is that there are no rules. So everyone is absolutely entitled to do things in their own way. Certainly it can be argued that if a single stamp is worth (say) 25 cents....then ten copies are worth $2.50 and keeping duplicates and putting them in albums IS an investment.

Well, some collectors do collect multiple copies of a single stamp. I do myself sometimes if it is very attractive and/or has many shades to compare. A page of a nice stamp can look pretty good.

Quite true. Can't do a color/shade study of any one stamp with out duplicates, but I'm more a specialist than a worldwide collector, so I tend to see a duplicate as more information rather than trading material.

I agree with David and Phil. For me, as a collector of classic Portuguese colonies, paper, shade and perf variations make each stamp an individual, not a duplicate.

You answered your own question well. Do whatever you want to do. Stamp collecting is a very personal and personalized hobby.

Many people hoard multiples of a particular stamp in order to study it for varieties of - cancellation, plate, printing, color-shade, and so-forth.

All of these are duplicates and not worth much but have some philatelic worth in that, over the years, I have managed to use duplicates and space-fillers to complete a row of Penny Reds as they would appear on a plate. Different plates make up this row of 12 of course but the check letters are as they would have been laid out... KA to KL

In terms of buying auction lots, the word "duplicated" tends to deter me. Yes, you can potentially find shade or postmark varieties if that interests you, but, in the main, you'll be left with a large pile of identical, usually common, stamps. Indeed, I have boxes and stock-books full of them!

The question really is, are duplicates worth collecting to you?
Some say no. Some say yes. It is all a matter of personal taste and interest.

Now that you have knowledge about why collecting duplicates can be a very good thing you are ready to begin to collect your way. Keep asking and learning and a very open mind. Have fun.

I say YES. I don't think 200 of a common definitive is the best, but often you can have something like 3-4 of the same stamp, same issue, but one has bad centering AND an interesting cancel. One has great centering but a bad cancel. One is a different shade of color for some reason. One still has selvage attached.

It all depends on the focus of your collection.

Well for any lot, whether it has duplicates or not, I base my buying/bidding on the stamps I actually need for my collection. I do a bit of mental math on how many stamps I could add and what those stamps are worth to me. Duplicates or stamps I don't want don't really enter into the equation, unless they're valuable enough to sell on their own. Long story short, I'll buy heavily duplicated lots if I'm not really paying for the duplicates(at least in my mind). And even though I'm a collect-one-of-each type of collector, I'm not above collecting shades or interesting postmarks, etc, so some duplication doesn't really bother me.

That's exactly my method.

Just recently, I have found 2 stamps from Poland unlisted in Scott from my duplicates, and again East India ½a Die 1A and 1B from duplicates.

First be sure that the stamps are actually duplicates. Many advanced collectors specialize in certain countries and even certain issues. Stamps might share the same design, but have different color, perforations, paper, plate varieties, cancels and so on, and these are of interest to specialists (and sometimes world wide collectors if their catalog gives the variety a major number). Sometimes the rarer varieties might be worth far more than the common variety.

On the other hand, plenty of collections have duplication of common stamps that are of no additional value or interest. I recently purchased a collection (sight unseen) that was expensively housed with stamps painstakingly mounted in many many volumes. It became obvious the collector kept and mounted every duplicate - most times with no interesting difference and mostly in the very common stamps. It was odd.

I have plenty of copies based on specialized differences and plenty one could classify as duplicates, but I've kept them for slight differences that are of interest.

From the OP. If a stamp is worth??? $.25 then ten duplicates are worth??? $2.50 and are an investment?????????

Say it ain't so!

What may be a duplicate stamp to one collector can be something entirely different to another. Case in point. I became a stamp collector when I was a young child. To help me build my collection, my mother's uncle would send me an occasional envelope containing some of his U.S. duplicates. Much to my dismay, it seemed to me that his envelope would always contain a good number of duplicates. While I appreciated the help, I didn't understand why he would routinely send me several copies of the same stamp. It was only after a couple of years that I finally came to understand the truth of the situation. To him, the stamps he would send contained no duplicates at all. Whereas I was simply collecting used U.S. stamps with no regard for the cancellation, Uncle Park was a precancel collector. Each of the used U.S. stamps he sent me would be precanceled and the "identical" Scott numbers which I identified would each sport the name of a different city.