My Worldwide Collection: An Ongoing Journey

I'm sorry to hear about the deer attack, and welcome back to the forum!

I joined around the time you started posting about your world wide collection. I had just moved to larger quarters, started semi-retirement, and was working on my collection again, which needed a lot of organization. My non U.S. interest is topical (organized by country, not topic) but I had several purchased collections and albums that contained items of topical interest. I have a philosophy of mounting everything I have, a WW "accumulation" if you will.

There was a lot of sorting to do (which I love to do) and decisions to be made about binders, pages, and mounting systems. I found your discussion of this VERY helpful in my decision process, though I drew the line at cutting hinges in half. I probable learned about Showgard Seconds and making top loading mounts by cutting taller split back mounts in half from you. Your posts have been really helpful and appreciated.

Sorry to hear about the bad break with your car. Hopefully you can still add a few meaningful things to your collection over the next months and years. Likewise, hope the insurance took some of the financial pain away.

Wow, this is one of my favourite threads. Just discovered it with the 2024 posts but I'm caught up from the beginning now.

I love your descriptions of your process at the beginning and how you're making continued progress.

But I'm most impressed by the quality of stamps in your collection. So many nice stamps from early to modern. My luck with buying larger lots has been poor to say the least. Your ability to buy a lot of nice material is inspiring.

Even when you merged in the 675 Chile stamps, you upgraded 100 stamps, and yet the original scans looked pretty darn fine to me. :)

Which begs the question -- in the lots you buy, what proportion of stamps don't make the cut to be added to your collection due to condition?

Well, my vehicle ordeal is about done. Insurance totaled it (finally). Nothing like trying to deal with Insurance Co, Insurance adjusters, repair shops, rentals, car dealers and banks.......mostly all in the same DAY! I'm worn!
All is not lost however, insurance check should arrive by Friday and I already have a new (to me) vehicle picked out. Hopefully things will be back to normal this time next week.

Back to stamps!

moneil - Thank you I'm glad you found some tidbits of info here that were helpful. One of my goals is to offer my own, alternative, perspectives and ideas and to emphasize that there is no right or wrong way to collect. One uses their own creative abilities, what ever they may be, and try to blend them with their own goals. For the record though, I have, for the time being stopped cutting hinges in half. Mostly because I've been picking up small batches of vintage hinges, here and there. It seems like I find one or 2 in many of the old collections I pick up, so I'm good for now on that front.

shermae Thanks. Insurance sure did help, and I am glad I kept full coverage on my truck, even though it was paid for. Deer are as thick as ticks around here right now. Got a few small lots coming in the mail as we speak but nothing major. I'm going to attempt to save some money to go to the show in St Louis next year, but won't hold my breath.

madbaker - Thank you for the kind words! I've actually never thought about the % of good to bad stamps. Obviously the hope is to have a high percentage of quality stamps, but when dealing with the larger, misc. lots I like, it's a crapshoot. I've been tossing my damaged stamps into plastic bins for a while now, and have filled a 2 gallon, plastic tote so far. Not sure what I'll do with them. Probably try to offer them up to the crafting community or something.
As far as upgrading goes, it can take on many forms. Most of the time it is simply trading a a used copy in favor of a mint copy, or trading out a mint copy in favor of a MNH copy. And other times I trade out a copy, that looks nice on th outside, but may have back damage, for a cleaner, more sound copy.

Onwards,

I am DONE with Costa Rica, for now.

First thoughts:
I really thought I was going to have better coverage overall, but it looks like this will be one of my weaker Latin America countries, at least until I can acquire a decent collection to bolster mine.

Numbers:
I printed Steiner pages through 1994, but lots of these only have 1, 2 or 3 stamps on them, and many are empty.
I did find it necessary to break away from Steiner with some of the early issues, where there are several perforation varieties to be found. Also added some special pages for postal stationery and revenues, at the end

All in all I managed to mount a total of 559 stamps, or stamp items.

My current, overall now stands at 68,140

For the first page, I didn't care for the Steiner page, so I just retooled it to fit my needs. I didn't care for the overprints being inside the boxes, so I just moved them outside, and identified them with the letters used in Scott. I also noticed Scott mentions some private overprints, so I made some spaces for their inclusion, since I had 2 that I believe are these private ovpt's



The 1889 set, featuring President Soto Alforo appears to come in several perforation varieties, according to Scott. But, since I have no specialized literature for this country, I had to improvise. What I did was sort all of mine into piles, based onm actual perforation measurements, and create an AlbumEasy template page based on the base set. I then made individual pages for each perforation measurement I had, changing the heading at the top to reflect that. I only scanned the one page for perf 15 because it had the most stamps mounted on it. I actually have 4 individual pages printed.


I did the same with the Arms set, but I have 6 different pages for perf varieties.


Didn't realize what these were before I saw the notation in Scott, so I went ahead and made a page for them as well.....Barred remainders, in 2 perforation varieties.









I think this is actuall ymy ONLY complete page for this country.



Also wasn't aware of these existing either. These are perforations, in the shape of a star, for officials to use in a postal purpose. If you look closely, you can see them. Trust me, they are there.




I haven't put much emphasis on postal stationery thus far, for any country, so I will be starting to add some as I go.



Some oddball revenues

Thank you for doing this. Over the last few evenings I have read this from start to finish and had a lovely time. Picked up all sorts of tips and hints and things to think about if ever I started to something like this.

Question- I was wondering if in the act of documenting your progress it pushes you to do a little more with it and it helps to keep the enthusiasm levels up. I realise most of the time it would be fun but there must be times when you ask yourself why - or why you committed. I ask as I am so tempted to do something similar - starting next year when I semi retire

sharonb - You're very welcome. It makes me happy when I can make even a small contribution to someone else's collecting journey.

As far as my enthusiasm goes, it's the stamps, the process and the constant discoveries that keeps me going. The documenting, while I do find it enjoyable, can actually get to be a burden. I'm sure it would be different if I had most of my collection sorted and mounted. Then I would have more time to share it with people. Right now, I still have a lot of stamps to process, so I find myself getting wrapped up in my stamps and forgetting about the documenting. I do need to find a good balance. I think if I make smaller, more frequent posts about what I am doing, it won't seem too taxing. It's when I have a documenting "recess" and I get overwhelmed with information I want to post about that builds up, that's when I get a bit frustrated.

.....and to that end......

My new project country is CROATIA

Rather than wait until I am done, I will share a few pages at a time.

So, this first page, full Steiner, is a bit sparse. I notice in Scott there are counterfeit overprints around, so I will have to investigate a bit further.


The 1941-43 castle, and other subject, issues state, in Scott, that these can be found in a variety of perforations. However, they don't go into detail and as of yet I haven't found any further info on this. So for now I leave the Steiner page intact and file all my duplicates for further investigation.



Ante Pavelich 1943-44
Steiner has this entire set, plus the Labor Day issue, on 1 page. Scott lists 2 of the Pavelich issues with perforation variants. Since I had 1 of those I decided to retool the page to include those. However, everything would no longer fit on a single page, so I decided to redesign the set, using AlbumEasy, splitting it it up to occupy 2 pages. Easy peasy!



More to come..............

A little, minor update for today.

I don't seem to buy as much nowadays, mostly because of financial restrictions, so when I do I try to find useful, targeted items.

Picked this Spanish first issue up in a Facebook group recently, to help me with my plate reconstruction project.

Some of you may remember I had quite the obsession with early Spanish stamps a while back, before getting to the point that I could no longer afford the things I wanted, and wound up selling much of what I had.

Since changing gear and going down the worldwide avenue, I have rekindled my interest in my Spanish stamps.

Unfortunately, since I sold most of my Spanish first issues, I had to start my plating projects all over again. So, now I am picking them back up one here, one there, and that's fine.



This one is from plate II, position 19. A key identifying feature is a small white line that runs through the "C" in CUARTOS (blue arrow), at the top.



This is my reconstructioon of the 40 types for plate II, as it stands today. A long way to go. It seems to be harder today to find usable copies (3-4 margins), at affordable prices, than it did 10 years ago.

Some oddball items I added this weekend:

Last weekend , while the wife and I were antiquing, I found a framed display of Pennsylvania Trout/Salmon stamps. There were 10 stamps all mounted with Showgards. They ran from 1991 to 2000.

I'm always interested in adding these oddball state revenues when I can, although I don't intentionally look for them. These I paid less then 1/2 fv, all mnh. After buying them I did a little ebaying and happened across a group of licenses with thee exact stamps on them, for cheap, so I got them too.

They arrived yesterday, so I went ahead and made pages for them. I really liked the idea of mounting a mint copy side-by-side with a corresponding license. This is how I think I will pursue all my hunting/fishing stamps.

Here are some of those pages. From what I can see from Eric Jacksons website, the 1991 issue was the first, so I had a definitive starting point.

The stamps are mounted using my standard clear showgards, while the licenses use corner mounts. Works very well I think.

Wow! A plate reconstruction project of Spain #1!! This is sooooo nice!! I hope you'll put that on stampsmarter website and then collectors can use your project when finished. There's no plating reconstruction of Spanish stamps on internet yet, so philatelists need one!

I hope you didn't give up your project and I encourage you to finish it. (I'd personally certainly use your project if you finish it, it's really the kind of thing I like).

By the way, your worldwide collection thread is really nice too!

Thanks for sharing the fishing licenses. I have a few of my Dad's hunting licenses and I was thinking of mounting them in a similar fashion. You are inspiring me to make those pages!