Best Way To Sort Worldwide Stamps Before Putting In Album

I purchased a few boxes of stamps at a stamp show. There's a bit of everything in there. Some covers, stock books and loose stamps. My question is about all the loose stamps (there are thousands of them). Trying to figure out the best way to sort through these by country without taking up the entire dining room table for who knows how long until I'm done sorting them out. I do plan on putting them in my albums when I'm through.

I bought 2 little plastic containers that contain 16 holders each but of course that's not nearly enough. I've done baggies in the past but that gets so disorganized. Is there any tray or other idea that would sort a large number of countries nicely?

Thanks for your help!

Absolutely.
Takes up the size of your average dictionary.

You need to purchase GK102 cards.

Find a box that will hold them, I use a Chinese take away container.

As you take 1 stamp, say "French Morocco" write the name on the card, plop in the stamp, .take the next stamp ......continue ad nauseum.


Mine are highly organised, I have a set for "Country" a set for "year"
and a set for "value"

I sort by COUNTRY, then when you have hundreds of say Canada, you can sort by year...etc etc.

When it's time for cooking the wife dinner, just slip the box/es, into a drawer...too easy.

PS: It can still be troublesome, unless you become proficient in using "Prinz" Long Nose Pointy Tweezers.
For the ability to pick up stamps effortlessly off the table, and to catch mosquitoes mid air.

If you don't have a spare table, use a large piece of board/cardboard. How you sort will reflect your organisation of your collection. For an initial sort, I'd break into British area, French area etc, large countries or continents. Put in heaps on your board. As the heaps grow, transfer to envelopes or glassines, which can be further broken down later. Store in shoe-box. Look at them in five years' time.

Another Idea for the more advanced Worldwide Collector,
(sorting 1000's at a time)

Purchase "A5" ring binders (approx $6 ea) pages just a few pennies.
Stick tags to pages giving country.

The focus here, is to be neat and organised, without stamps everywhere.

Echo Rod222's recommendation. I do the same. The 102 cards became messy as things started pilling up in 1000s.

I also have a large US and Worldwide collection which involves sorting mountains of materials.

For me the 102bk display cards in combination with the red 14" long storage boxes works quite well but admittedly I have a large space dedicated to this and rarely do they get put away.

The boxes and display cards are arranged in alphabetical country order with an index card sized label and divider to separate countries. Obviously some countries take an entire box or more.

Will upload pictures later.

Oh by the way at first when sorting through large amounts of various country stamps, I will put several stamps of that country into each display card in order to speed up the initial sorting process, then later I will go back country by country to identify, sort and label the individual countries display cards by catalog number and condition where each display card holds a single stamp unless an exact duplicate.

This method is pricey but for a large amount of material I feel like it gives me the option to decide what should be added to an album holding the finest material.

This could also be done using dollar store plastic trays as previously mentioned which will save money instead of using the red boxes. I initially began with cardboard boxes cut down to size (height wise) using the cut off cardboard as dividers between rows of 102 cards.

Everybody who reads this chapter has their own method or does it a little different .

I can explain how I do it and it may differ than you . The first thing is to get a cup of coffee or something to drink . Your first goal is to learn what the box contains and to see if there is any order to the box and what's in it. Go thru the whole box and notice it parts are there glassines or dealer cards or even album pages .

After going thru and getting a idea of what you have ,then your ready to sort . I sort to five piles they are 1} Stamps on paper 2} loose stamps 3} stamps in glassines or dealer cards or covers 4}Album pages or large pieces. 5}Treasures ,stuff that needs attention right away .

I will go into more detail later .

Sorting loose stamps for me has to be a faster process ,so I use a stock card system ,it takes two stock cards ,I will fill 5 or 10 sets of cards before I sort to country and place them in note books . Here are cards that are being filled .

I do something somewhat similar to floortrader. But I label a page (front and back) of a stock book with each letter of the alphabet and initially sort my stamps that way (alphabetically). Then they could be sorted by country and placed directly into the album.

All good methods. But I'm glad that I am beyond this phase of my collecting career. Real happy to be down-sizing instead of adding large amounts, in bulk, of new stuff.

STEVE - I will never get beyond this phase because I watch the News and football on cable T.V. and it drives me nuts trying to sit through those commericals. I have to be doing something like sorting thru a box of stamps .

I am currently using size 6 3/4 envelopes to sort several mixtures and assorted packets of worldwide by country and keeping the envelopes sorted alphabetically in a #6 glassine storage box.

It may not be a perfect system, but it's working well enough for me so far.

I'm looking forward to the long weekend coming up to make some better progress. I've been trying to go through 2-400 stamps in a sitting, but sometimes it feels like all I've managed to do is chip an ice cube off a glacier.

I sort tons of stamps, and collect all world. Here's my method for a huge bag (1kg plus) of all world off-paper stamps.

I work in stages. First I sort into stuff I want, stuff I dont want, mint stamps (I don't collect them and sell the lot), and on-paper stamps (there always seem to be of them left in any off-paper mix).

Taking your off-paper stamps that you want (or maybe want), its now time for a more detailed sort. I use a large card wallet file placed on my knees, with a board underneath it to stiffen it. The wallet file is big enough to allow me to make 25 piles of stamps -- 5 going across, and 4 or 5 down. Piles I sort into are as follows:
US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada
Germany, France, Channel Islands, GB
Other Europe, Spain, Italy
Commonwealth Africa, Commonwealth Caribbean, Africa, Islands (+assorted small places)
South America, Arab world, Asia, Eastern Europe.
(that doesnt add up to 25 -- usually there are some temporary piles depending on what the mixture seems to be, as maybe it has a lot of some particular country)

Once a pile gets too high and looks like it might collapse, I transfer it to an appropriate envelope in the sorting shoebox. Keep sorting, transferring piles from time to time, until the supply of unsorted stamps is exhausted, then transfer remaining piles into envelopes.

Once you have a few envelopes full of a particular region, you can then sort them into individual countries, using a similar procedure. Commonwealth Caribbean requires about 25 country piles, likewise Asia, Africa, Arab world etc etc. Anything from the smaller/obscure countries goes into a miscellaneous pile -- because there are more than 25 countries in these areas, but lots of places produce hardly any used stamps.

Then you can transfer the little piles into the appropriate single-country envelopes. (I have about 40 shoeboxes of single country envelopes, ordered by region)

I developed this system as I found the most time consuming activity in sorting is not the sorting per se but sticking the stamps into the appropriate single-country envelopes (it takes about a minute per transfer), and this system minimizes the number of times you're going to have to do that.

This is a good system for sorting really huge amounts of totally unorganized stamps -- I plow through a few kilos per week.

My system, which is fairly similar to the others:
I actually just got done sorting a random tub of worldwide, off paper, about 50k stamps.

I have a sorting tray (old small parts tray) with 30 compartments. I first sort alphabetically, putting all "A" countries into one compartment, "B" countries next, etc...
Some compartments fill up faster than others obviously, so as they fill up, I remove them and do a breakdown by country and place them in standard sized envelopes, which I just store in the boxes that the envelopes come in (about the size of a shoe box). They will stay in these envelopes until I am ready to work on any individual countries.

When I start working on individual countries, I first sort out the countries, usually by identifiable definitive sets, commemoratives, back of the book, revenues, etc..

As I identify stamps, I place them in penny sleeves, with card stock inserts. If you are not familiar with penny sleeves, they are polypropylene bags, 2.5" x 3.5", normally use for sports cards. I store these in "monster boxes", also used for sports cards, with a 2500 ct. capacity each. I currently have 3 of these filled with the stamps ready to be mounted, once I print the album pages.

Most of my worldwide collection is organized into geographical areas: Europe A-H, Europe I-Z, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, British Empire (Scott International pages to mid-1969). I use Tupperware-type containers/tubs, labeled with the indicated geographical areas. Once the stamps are initially sorted into these tubs, I sort each tub in alphabetical order for mounting in my albums. I'll normally finish/mount a specific tub before proceeding to the next one. If there appears to be a substantial number of stamps from one or more countries, I'll add a tub for that country; sometimes more than one specific country tub is added. This works quite well for me; of course, YMMV.

I put mine on Vario pages sorted by country. I may keep them separate from album in "to be mounted" binder or I may place in the album with country on vario pages. I may identify early issues (prior to 1945) and put tags next to them so I know Scott number when multiple stamps with same design. This may include stamps that I need to spend more time to identify (watermark, etc).