Alright, here's the results of my tabulation so far. Count of different stamps by year or denomination will take significantly longer since I'll have to soak, resort, and file the stamps first.
For 1/2 kilo mission mix of New Zealand stamps from
www.sdcollectables.co.uk:Total number of undamaged stamps: 2249, or 125.9 stamps per ounce. Higher than I expected, probably since most of the stamps are not as large as the Norway stamps I've worked with lately. Also, the paper on most stamps was single and pretty close cut.
Not terribly surprising for modern kiloware. The stamp distribition by year looks like an exponential decay away from 2007 with a bit of extra weighting in the 80's from 2007 in terms of stamps in the lot... interesting. Perhaps the extra weighting in the 80's is due to collections ending up in the kiloware to some small degree? Or perhaps the mixing of different charity sources? The big peak in 1996 is artificial, since many of those stamps are self-adhesive versions of the scenic stamps of 1996, but these were released in 1998. I didn't feel like sorting by perf. numbers on hundreds of stamps that I would never soak.
This effect occurred one or two other times to much lesser degrees, if I recall correctly.
Again, not too surprising that the 1990's and 00's letter rate stamps are the most common (40, 45, 50 cent). However, the higher value stamps (say, $1+) hang in there and account for 9.2% (208 stamps) of the total. Anyone else have experience with New Zealand kiloware to know if this is normal, or elevated due to at least part of the stamps being collected as international mail to Great Britain? Those last 3 little peaks out by the $1.8 on the horizontal axis are $1.50, $1.80, and $2 (excel shifts the labels to the left a bit for some reason).
I expect that these numbers are slightly elevated in terms of total stamps undamaged, as I find that at every stage in processing kiloware I find damaged stamps I didn't see before. However, I've gone through two distinct steps now, so I don't expect more than a few percent more damaged to show up. Also, I won't be soaking them all, so we'll not know the exact yield per ounce, but the eventual analysis of the total number of different stamps and their distributions will be unaffected by this (no damaged stamps at that stage).
Hope some of you enjoy this kind of basic analysis. If you have ideas of what else to look at, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
I'll post some pics of the actual stamps as I start soaking/resorting the stamps.
Clark
Posted 09/20/2009 2:20 pm
