Harding Stamp Question How To Tell If Valuable?

Like I've posted before I got all these old stamps I work all the time and do not have the time to do the proper research so I post the ones on here that he thinks are valuable come to find out most of them are just common stamp worth nothing he sent me this one this morning thinking it is something.

How many old stamps did he, or you, come into?

There is a useful tool at http://www.stampsmarter.com/1847usa...ntifier.html that is fairly quick to search by keyword (Harding in this case) to then find what you have.

If you are after just the monetary value, you then could look on ebay by the scott number at past sales.

A few quick tips.

1. If the collector did not spend large amount of m9ney in the hobby good chance no hidden gem.

2. If the collector did not take special care of valuable stamps best bet they are common.

3. If the collector does not have some of the higher target easy to identify stamps such as the Colombian issue there is a good bet the few stamps you thing are gems are common.

My point is if your looking at a few hard to find rare stamps with none of the above indicators then you really should take some time to review several resources and learn.

There is more about your stamp on this specific Stamp Smarter page http://stampsmarter.com/1847usa/ByYear/1923.html
Don

I didn't mean to sound grumpy but just disappointed when people don't take the time to learn. For example you have a black Harding stamp. Go to stampsmarter. You will find 4 Harding stamps. 610, 611, 612 and 613. We can toss out 611 which is imperforated. Now we are stuck as you need to let us know what the perfs are. 610 perfs at 11 612 perfs at 10 and 612 at 11.

I think a lot of the 'big find' discoveries are just sensationalist journalism around significant outliers.

The better material has largely been aggregated. Selloffs of discovered goods have largely already happened at least once in the last 120 years, and as such have crossed at least one dealer or an auction.

This means that if someone has higher valued goods, it is more than likely they paid higher prices for the stamps through one of these avenues. So the likelihood you stumble on say an invert in an el cheapo collection is 0. Many other discoveries (errors) may have been made at the sheet level, and then broken up. So the original supply was not dispersed through 100 random envelopes or 100 people random buying at the PO.

Do outliers exist... Can a Z grill be lurking in plain sight, in an album in grandma's closet, of course. Not likely in most cases, but if you knew Grandpa to be a multi millionaire and had shown you a Jenny invert when he was alive the likelihood is much higher.

There's that old saying, used in the medical profession, but applicable here too: "if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."