Largest Number Of Stamps In A Collection ?

Don't understand the largest number of stamps on a envelope .....what I want to know is the largest collection.


Largest collection is not a basement filled with plastic bags full of on paper kilo mixtures ,you can call that a HOARDER . A real collection is one where you can ask for a certain item and it is there to look at .


The number of collections has to be one out of every FIVE so call collectors ,most are FEW steps away from being HOARDERS .

floortrader: Is your collection the largest on SCF?

For Canadian stamps, Ron Brigham had one of the largest and most valuable collections.

Largest number of stamps on an envelope is because it's simply cool to receive an envelope or package covered almost entirely with stamps.

Philipp von Ferrary had a collection in which every page was photographed many years ago. It is 45 loose leaf books, each with approx. 250 photos. He died in 1917, but at the time it was far and away the largest and greatest collection ever formed. Pretty much every rarity and error, whether stamps or postal history that was known about at the time was included. Plus a lot of other great material. There are very few full sets of photos in existence; the PF has a set.

I've written a couple of posts about this on my blog. Guinness recently awarded a world record for largest stamp collection: 400 million, but like you say, this sounds like a hoard.

I'm much more interested in the most complete worldwide collections. Here is a link to a list I've compiled: https://globalstamps.blogspot.com/2...e-stamp.html

I would very much like to know of ones I've missed.

The Royal,Collection of Empre/Commonwealth material is likely to be very substantial, but plainly comes with caveats, chiefly that, since George V, the collection has been managed by employees, rather than an individual collector. The "royal" sobriquet also doubtless means that substantial volumes of stamps are acquired gratis. I don'tthink that there's much doubt that Ferrary had the greatest world collection, although he didn't live to add pages of wallpaper to reach modern-day volumes.

rev - that sounds like a prime digitisation project!

I noticed in the comments from the Filling Spaces blog that "ChrisW said...
How about the famous Jim Jackson collection? It must be at least 10-15K larger than Bud's complete BigBlue? And 'floortraders' must be on par with other modern collections you mentioned?"

So Floortrader, care to comment?

JOGIL ---My collection is a decent size and growing at a faster pace ,now that I am retired .

The whole subject of "The biggest collection " has a lot of different ways to explain "biggest" .

Without question the FERRARY collection holds the top spot .As posted above it is true we may never know all the massive collections out there.

I saved the November, 2000, issue of the American Philatelist due to Ron van der Holt's article of spending Christmas, 1990, in Goa, to recover from various injuries after a long trek in Nepal. He met the octogenarian father of the owner of the bungalow where he stayed, a Mr. D'Souza. Turned out that Mr. D'Souza had a collection of Portuguese India stamps & covers described by Ron as: "after a few in-depth history and geography lessons, I was escorted into Mr. d'Souza's study, which was lined with shelves loaded with stamp albums."

From the limited description, it sounded like a massive collection of apparently just the one country. Mr. D'Souza had lamented he could not interest any of the family in the hobby. Almost thirty years later (from the date of Ron's visit), I still wonder what happened to that collection.

Does anybody know if the stamp auction catalogs exist for the Ferrary collection ,has anyone try to republish them ?

Scroll down to Ferrari.

http://pbbooks.com/auct.htm

Dr. Chen Chang is taking a crack at it:

http://worldstampalbum.com/main.aspx

Completion is a tricky term. For my interests, I would love to see someone attempt a US 20th century specialized collection including minor catalog numbers. My current stamp budget is way too low to do this but I am trying... Also so many issues are impossible to track down, even on the cheaper end of the spectrum. At least with the 19th century stuff you have documented providence.

Completion is out of the question ,nobody can do it . Maybe having 3 or 4 employees plus a unlimited budget .

But going how far you can will have its challenges . The difficulty has been address by many . Recently Kelleher Stamp Auctions brought up some of the issues they have seen in a recent auction catalog .

They stated many of the better worldwide collections usually have 4 or 5 strong countries and then many naked countries or blank pages . Another problem is worldwide collections lack powerful stamps and the stamps catalog only up to a certain level.

Another problem that comes up is worldwide collector only collect and fill their collection to the album , You see this mostly with Scott #1's where their is a lot of parts of sets and not complete sets .Plus the Scott's album series leaves out a lot of stamps .

20th century US completion is not out of the question, even with the minor numbers. If one actually has the money and the interest, there would be plenty of dealers willing to help, so many of those nearly impossible numbers would over time become a lot more possible. Material would start to funnel in, because everyone would know there was interest and money to spend. Even very scarce varieties would start to show up.

ROGDCAM ---Thanks for the link to the Dr.Chen Chang collection . That is the finest worldwide collection on display . Impressive what he done .