Sorting Through A Shoebox Of Mixed World Stamps

I don't know if this topic should be in Kiloware instead, if so please move it.

Some of you may have seen me around in the coin forum. I've been trying to start up a university numismatic & philately club, but not much success yet. Right now it's more like a little circle of five friends. My posters did catch some attention though, and one person donated a whole shoebox of stamps! According to them, the stamps are used world stamps from the 1960s-1990s.

This is going to be a challenge for someone who doesn't know stamps! I'll sort them out by country to start with, but there are a lot of them with cyrilic script, which I don't read. I'll be sorting as much of these as I can for now, and some individual pics when I get stuck on the cyrilic ones. So far I'm seeing a lot of Canadian and mixed European.

Looks like a fun day or so of sorting. Besides the stamps, that pack of hinges, if unopened, sells for $15-$20 on ebay!

Here's a link to a site that will help you identify Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Asian stamps:

http://www.stampmasteralbum.com/For...dexAsian.htm

The best find in the shoebox may be the package of hinges. Full packages of vintage Dennison or Fold-O-Hinges are selling for atound $20 on E-Bay.

Looks like the bulk of them are Bulgarian. I'm impressed how well these stamps were taken off, whenever I try they either come out still sticky or crinkly and water-damaged.

After sorting by country, what would the next step be? Would it be by denomination or by series?

I have no intention of selling these, if the campus club works out it will be for the club. Otherwise, it's going to be donated to a local stamp club.

And wow! It's empty now, but one wonders what was in this envelope.

One reason that some of your stamps might be in better than expected condition is that they could be CTOs. "Cancelled-To-Order" stamps were issued by many countries in the latter 20th century. These are stamps that were cancelled by the issuing postal service & sold as used without ever having traveled through the mail system. I believe Bulgaria was one of many countries doing this.

Okay, I got it sorted mostly by country, unless there're so few of those it would be a waste of envelope so I just threw them in as mixed regions. I don't think I've eaten so much dust in a single day before.



What's the next step to getting these sorted?

Edit: Also, I'm really happy there is a Concorde stamp in that mix! Might be keeping this one for myself. It's printed directly on the envelope paper though and not stuck on it, does that still count as being a stamp?