Washington-Franklins: The Collector's Epic Challenge

I have about 100 W/F plus about 20 line pairs - nowhere close to completion. All bought at auction (usual suspects - Harmer, Cherrystone, Kelleher, Siegel, etc.) with certs for any of reasonable value. I've probably paid up for many of these, but, given my standing relatively low on the learning curve with these creatures, I preferred to go this route for a reasonable level of assurance that I was getting what I was paying for.

I declined the accept the challenge. Too much money and authentication required.

I have a complete collection except for some of the expensive coils and and blue papers. I may get a few more, but at this point, the only obstacle is money. Everyone gets the cheaper stamps first and then works up to the more expensive ones. There are no differences between W-F and and other stamps in how you acquire them. I used stamps2go.com for getting cheap stamps, and then moved on to ebay. At some point, ebay starts running fairly thin, and the best source for quality stamps are the auction houses (Siegel, Cherrystone, HR Harmer, Harmer-Schau, Rumsey, Kelleher) and bourse dealers. I also recommend Century Stamps for quality W-F stamps. You need certs on every single flat-plate coil, even the cheap ones, or you are sure to have fakes in your collection. W-F stamps are not hard to find - the challenge is in identifying them correctly and avoiding fakes.

I have a pile of these things that I just gave up on.

Phil - Don't forget Rupp Brothers.

Would love to see your 534B if you care to share.

Right there with you! My album has a light dusting of cheap, used W-Fs, which I picked up years ago, but since I'm concentrating on MNH specimens for my U.S. collection nowadays, I have a sufficient task at hand just dealing with the 4th Bureau Issue (which of course I will never complete).

Im new to collecting and as far as W/Fs go I have a few. And am yet to find out about one old franklin with candlestick 1 cent on it. Its a very old album gifted to me by very old people some 30 years ago (when I was just a wee thing). They knew I collected coins so they may have thought id look after them for the future. I never felt that philatelic urge until just recently when I went through some stored items id put away more than 20 years ago. Never mind the W/Fs.. One look at those first issue revenues and I came over all aflush! So my advice is, be nice to the neighbours. Spend some time and share some stories. good luck

How to "complete" the WFs...

For me the greatest challenge in obtaining WFs has not been acquiring material but deciding what to acquire. That is to say, my greatest challenge has been one almost every collector must face, and that is to find a personally satisfactory definition for the word "complete". ;)

In some areas I have specialized far beyond material even covered by catalogs like Scott. For the WFs, that's not really an option for me. In fact, obtaining a sample for every major Scott Catalog number, or even having no holes in my illustrated album pages, isn't an option for me. I will simply never have a 389 for example.

How did I define "complete"? I'm a bit of a flyspecker. I also find stamp production changes and experimentation interesting. So for me, I have a few dozen pages in my US albums devoted to WFs that look something like this:

Ditto, Stallzer. Tempting though, isn't it?

Jack Kelley

Actually it is. After responding to this thread earlier I decided to break them out and systematically mow through them 1 by 1. That lasted for all of about 10 stamps, then back to the pile and the memory kicked in on why I gave up on them in the first place, watermarks......

Just skip the ones with difficult watermarks. . .80% of them will be easy. It is much easier to sort them by one dimension at a time. Start obviously with denomination/design (it is very easy to waste time by overlooking the 2 Cents vs Two Cents" stamps.) Then split them up by offset vs. engraved. Then go by perforation, watermarks, then by flat plate vs. rotary, and finally by type. Have a spreadsheet with all the options close by so you can skip checking on things that don't exist (like a 3c double line / perf 11). As you check each dimension, keep a pile of "unknown" if you can't easily tell. If you have a pile of them, don't try to do them one at a time.

The only 2 things I find difficult are the watermarks and some of the types. Sorting by Perfs and printing process is pretty simple, the single line watermarks are what make me toss them back into the pile to figure out another day. The type that I can't figure out are used ones which have identifiers covered by postmarks / cancels.