I Have Inherited Quite A Large Collection - Need Help / Tips / Advice

Hello to all,

Newcomer here, looking forward to learning as much as I can about philately !
so here's the jist:

i've inherited a large collection of stamps (500+) from my great uncle and it includes stamps from pretty much all over ( Middle East, Asia, France and former French colonies, South America, Soviet Bloc, Western Europe). if I had to date them i'd say most are situated between 1900 - 1970s although there are so many that I haven't had the time to go through them all.

I have great respect for anyone who collects stamps and would like to honor my great uncle by taking care of his collection, i'm not much interested in value although i'm interested in figuring out how to value a collection because as I understand it,valuation plays a big role in philately.

I would appreciate it if any veteran could help me out here, set me on the right track !

i've included below a couple of pictures of the stamps (you can hopefully gauge their conditions)

thank you all for your patience and looking forward to learning as much as I can from all of you

Welcome.
Appears to be an interesting group of material. I would start by making digital images of every page/group to preserve what your grandfather recorded. I would then begin to work on one group at a time to ID the stamps and then move them to Vario type stock pages.
Don

Thank you for your prompt reply 51studebaker,

i will follow your advice by first preserving the stamps by taking digital pictures of every set and then will work my way group by group in order to ID them !

how would you recommend ID'ing them ? should I refer to Stampworld esque websites in order to start figuring what each one is ?

thank you

With digital images done, you should be able to use a reverse image lookup (http://stampsmarter.com/learning/Home_HowTo.html ) for each series of stamps. The search results should give you a number of sites to check out including those which offer significant amounts of details.
Don

Once you have cataloged everything, sort them my country. That process is difficult at the start, but it starts going very quickly as your pile of "unknown" stamps gets smaller and smaller. If you can get a hold of a set of Scott Catalogs for the world, that is an invaluable resource to id and to value your stamps. You don't need a new set. Even a 15-year-old set will do. Prices don't change drastically. You can probably get access to a set at a decent library. Or you can buy a used set for less than $100. Once you start using physical catalogs, yoy can move an order of magnitude faster than scanning stamps individually.

It is not likely your collection has a lot of monetary value. Very few stamps issued after about 1920 have much value, and before that, most stamps unless from a collection built from buying individual stamps won't be worth a lot of money, but you never know. Those new-looking stamps with perfect cancellations in the corner are cancel-to-order (CTO) stamps that are very pretty, but almost always have near zero monetary value.

Some of those Hungarian stamps overprinted for use under Romanian occupation, the "Debrecen" issues might be worth a few bucks, but be aware of the note in the Scott catalogue preceding the section where these are listed which says that the overprints have been extensively forged, and that even the inexpensive values are difficult to find with genuine overprints. Unless accompanied by certificates of authenticity, these issues when found in casual collections can be assumed to be forgeries.

Yes they overprints look way too new and fresh as compared to the stamps they are printed on. For sure forgeries. Overall this collection is really not worth much at all but it will be fun sorting it out.