A Thought - How Many Ton's Of Unsorted Stamps On Off Paper

Was just thinking reading through some posts, How many tonnes of unsorted stamps are in collectors hands, how much still to be soaked before being sorted.

Food for thought.

None ----Everything is sorted and in dealer cards or glassines . What is left are in binders for each country .

The real question is the # of pounds of on-paper compared to the number of pounds of Steiner pages containing soaked stamps and the critical question of which is growing faster!

"Question of which is growing faster " ----It is the RED BOXES for me .

I have to believe thousands of pages from Scott Internationals Big Blues are thrown away each day as thousands of pages are printed each day of the Steiner pages .

I'm not the most active ww stamp collector, but I've thrown away hundreds of old Scott and Minkus pages.

btw, I use glassines and dealer cards as well. Stock books are for temporary storage.

I have many hundreds of empty, used Scott Intl pages, but haven't thrown them away yet. Not really sure why, since I'm sure they're no use to anyone (including me)...

"They're no use to anyone " They have two uses for me .First the International's are poorly layed out and a lot of sections don't flow right ,like airmail and postage dues are on the same page for pre-1940's and then following years are on separate pages .I need two sets of pages to straight out this mess . Also some of the smaller countries are not in the right order when alphabetize your pages .

I use pages from the Internationals for my duplicates. I remove the pages and three hole punch them . Then put them in notebook binders usually each Big Blue Scott's binder makes three notebook binders and they lay flat on the desk and much easier to work with .

I save album pages that have quality black mounts attached, as the mounts can usually be removed and reused for exhibits. Doesn't take long to accumulate many thousands of mounts of all sizes that way, and that can certainly be useful.

I only bother to save pages with modern style black mounts in good shape, though; pages with old PM-style mounts, Crystal mounts, or beat-up mounts go straight to the trash.

We save all blank pages. My wife folds them over the top of file folders containing collections on pages that we sell and as separators. She prefers used glassine interleaves but blank pages work and are free!

i don't bother with stamps on paper normally but I sometimes come across something still on paper, those that I can use in my collection I soak off, if not I just pass them on to the next person.

i mount my stamps on blank pages, since I have the same problem as floortrader - i'm waaaaay too specialized a collector so no preprinted page is good enough.

for the original question... my thoughts are that 95% or more of the older stuff is off paper, later on there will be more material still on paper as it has no or little interest to anyone... but still, I would assume it's still not more than maybe 20%... the modern era it would yet again increase.

Yes, you're right floortrader. I did the same - used dup pages for fixing up the ordering of countries when I consolidated multiple IPSA sets. I do really hate how Scott ran countries together in IPSA I. But now I have tons still left over. Still hoping someone I run into will want them I guess.

1000s of unsorted and some need to be soaked stamps (yes, most modern). I hope to use old or duplicate album pages for club auctions. I liked reading the other ideas and views on their use. thank you.

Am getting about 100kg of stamps on paper per year by the biggest charity still doing kiloware in Australia and about 30kg is recent.

Recent kiloware would be lucky to be 150kg per year in total Australia.

30kg would be rest of world all eras for me per year.

40kg of older Australia for me per year.

At auction about 300kg just keeps going to auction. Another 300kg still in other collectors cupboards.

Just a guess!

15 years ago could get 300kg per month from 1 source only. Things have really changed.