Next Sparks Auction...4 Full Days Of Entertainment

From an email received:

Sale 30, May 22-25th, 2019
Welcome to Sparks Auctions' 30th sale, which will take place in our offices in Ottawa over four sessions between Wednesday, May 22nd and Saturday, May 25th, 2019.

Things are going very well here at Sparks, with each auction surpassing the last, in realizations, new customers and lovely material consigned. This sale is no exception, and offers our usual very wide variety of material for all collecting interests and budgets, all in an unprecedented four day event. In order to accommodate the vast amount of material, we have shuffled our usual order and will devote the entire second day to Postal History before continuing with Canada etc.

This is the auction with that 94 volume Minkus worldwide collection. The bookcase to house it all can be purchased as well :)

Although I'm not in the market for that (would need to build an extension!), took a quick look last night and definitely some interesting stuff to bid on.

There's a lot more scans (80) of the 94 volume collection on the Sparks website.

The binders are Minkus Supremes, but the pages appear to mostly be Scott International, supplemented in some countries (not all) with G&K Brown Int'l reprints to get better coverage of classic issues. Guess this was put together after Scott acquired the Minkus brand.

94 volume worldwide collection and the firm puts a estimate of $15,000 on it ??? Even if they put a $30,000 price on it for a estimate the question I would have is what am I missing????......a decent 94 volume collection should be closer to $50,000.

But then again ,what does it have ????

There is a lot to be said for low estimates. Harmer is putting estimates on lots that do not entice bidders to start bidding hoping for a bargain and subsequently have a high pass rate. Low openings bring people in and once they start they get caught up in competing. It looks so much better to have most of your lots exceed estimate even if it is a numbers game.

Looked through the extra scans for the 94 volume collection and didn't see anything too amazing IMO. So it may be broad and not very deep, so to speak.

If it was deep it would have been broken down into Country lots. As it is it opens at $5 which allows it to seek its own level.

GMOT----"broad" meaning " many" ,but any serious collector is going to ask ---HOW MANY DIFFERENT STAMPS ? . If we use a general statement how big of a collection of worldwide ALL different stamps can you get for $15,000 the answer would be ---around 200,000 stamps ,that would be 2,000 stamps per volume .

That's the sixty-four dollar question. This is a "must inspect" kind of lot. You'd have to look at this thoroughly to actually know whether it's worth substantially more than estimate.

There are a bunch of scans that do give some information useful for evaluating the lot. Based on the scans, as somebody who buys a lot of collections, I'd observe:

• TBH, the 19th century pages I saw scanned were mostly sparse. UK Victoria line-engraved issues thin without anything above a shilling value, USA with only the 3c in the 1869 pictorals, e.g. The early pages that were full were Scott International pages, not Specialty or Brown International pages, those are missing the power stamps.
• The better stuff shown in the scans were mostly $50-$100 sets from 1920-1980, some hinged.
• Didn't see scans of tougher dead countries (small Spanish/German/Portuguese colonies, e.g.) besides the Annam & Tonkin. Who knows how good, say, the Indian feudatory states are? Probably not great or they'd be shown.
• Looking through the highlights in the description, only a couple $500+ items are mentioned, most are in that $50-$100 range.
• It's noted that some countries continue into the 2000s or 2010s, but not all. If a bunch of countries do and they're substantially complete mint, that's a lot of face value, but we aren't shown or told that and can't assume it.
• Most really extensive world collections are sold broken up into country collections. In the same Sparks sale, there's a 220 volume collection on Steiner pages broken up by country or area.
• 95% complete country collections, missing the expensive stuff, into the 1980s or 1990s, often sell for $200-$300 an album. Not most popular countries, but many of them.
• The albums appear nice and in very good condition, if you want an A-Z set this looks like an interesting opportunity with solid binders, slipcases, and a giant bookshelf. Description says the binders and pages originally cost $13K and that sounds like an accurate number.

Without inspection you can't tell which countries have really good earlies (if any) or how many extend complete or nearly complete to recent years, or if there are any awesome extras that somehow weren't noticed by the describer (with 94 volumes, it does seem like that's possible). Those things can tell you if this is a $200/album collection or a $500/album collection.

It's a valuable lot and an impressive collection, easily worth the estimate I think, but how much more who knows. I can't inspect it in person, so this is not on my dance card, but it'll be interesting to see how it does.

It took my wife about 2 minutes to figure out we could go see the collection and "coincidentally" visit the Ottawa Tulip festival, so it looks like we'll be flying to Ottawa.

Where does one find the pictures of the bookcase?

The first thread about the May Sparks auction had pictures:

https://goscf.com/t/65155

KRELYEA - Looking forward to your visit and review of that massive collection . Hope you have time to give us your impression of the whole collection .

From what I seen on SAN and their site ,my guess it is not something a collector would purchase too many duplicates to their existing collection and very few runs of better sets .A ebay seller who sells country collections would be the likely buyer .

Thanks for the picture, I think I need a bigger house!

I have broken up 2 large collections recently 27 V and 30 V and I have found that many collectors buy all the pages up to 2000 or later but then find collecting the stamps after the 1970s or so is too overwhelming. The result is a collection with hundreds of empty pages. If this collection is largely empty pages it would be good for an ambitious collector not me. Another issue is that it looks like a lot of the collection is on Scott Specialized pages which would explain haw it got to be 95 albums. I have found collections on the nice Specialized pages are difficult to sell because the stamps are so spread out. I just hope I see more stamps than tulips!

I will report.

Ken

It may appeal to someone - with a fair amount of money - who wants to start collecting impressively. Would love to get up there myself (not that far) but timing probably won't work out. More interested in some of those country collections on Steiner pages in any case.

If you live in Canada...add another 13% tax to your purchase to the 15% buyers premium...plus shipping!
It helps if you have deep pockets!

If I buy this white elephant will I be charged customs tax when I bring it back to the US?