Encapsulated Stamps

A snippet from a craigslist ad:

"a small lot of Federal duck stamps. All are graded and encapsulated in PSE holders."

I've seen this a few times at antique stores as well. Is this a growing trend? Something about it irks me as I don't think stamps need to be sealed in plastic and never ever handled again. You can't mount them inside a normal album either. Anyone have any thoughts about this and the PSE (Professional Stamp Experts)?

Will

i am agaist holders. period

It's a lousy product, in my opinion, designed to allow the ignorant to participate in the stamp market without taking the time to learn what it's all about. The "slabbing", as they call it, is supposed to allow PSE to guarantee that the stamp is what it was at the time of examination, and therefore worth the amount being asked for it. Apparently, this has been a long-standing tradition in the coin collecting world, and PSE tried to transplant the same traditions in the stamp world. I think there has been a general backlash against it, and the practice has all but died on the vine, so to speak.

-Allen

Greetings

I remember reading in Linns and other major philatelic papers / magazines back in the 70s & 80s about the pros and cons of 'encapsulated' stamps.

For me personally, I am against that idea. What bothered me a lot was that some companies were promoting this idea to save valuable classic stamps.

Now, I am not a technical wiz but I do know that paper / stamps has to breathe to survive. I have been told that these holders literally will keep a stamp in place permanently. My understanding is that is it 'almost' impossible to remove any given stamp from it's holder once it has been encapsulated?? Am I correct?

If this is the case, then for the life of me, I do not know why anyone would want their stamps in these devices.

My opinion anyway <G>

Cheers

Bujutsu

My question: has anyone ever "slabbed" a complete sheet?

PSE is still offering encapsulation. I don't have any idea how common it is these days but apparently there are collectors who prefer it over other methods of stamp protection. I understand that it is quite expensive but at least it is not irreversible. It is not hard for me to imagine that encapsulation is desirable for an investment grade stamp that is not mounted in an album.

marty

I guess you could use an encased stamp as a paper weight on your stamp desk. LOL. I do not have anything worth expertizing or "slabbing". If I did, I do not think I would use this method.

The funny thing was that the stamps that were slabbed started with RW27..not RW1 or something like that. Why go all that effort to even get a certificate for RW27?
Will

Will, because they thought that it would make the stamps worth something if they had them graded. Have a look around at the ridiculous prices being asked for PSE graded stamps and you'll see what I mean. There's quite a few places around on the Internet that offer them... none are selling, apparently. How about $28 for a 1956 Booker T Washington stamp: http://www.eandmgradedstamps.com/1954-present.html - I'm sure I could pull a half dozen from my duplicate box that are just as good as this one, but they ain't slabbed, and catalog value for them is 20 cents - real value maybe a penny.

-Allen

Allen,
And that's why they are advertising on Craigslist...looking for a sucker. It's about as bad as those "gold replicas". As a lark, I would like to get one of those Cash4Gold envelopes you see on the TV commercials and throw in some of the gold replica stamps just to read their reply. As for the slabbing thing, it's just silly. It reminds me of the one Christmas special with the Grinch (not the 1st one), but the one where the Grinch encased all the children's toys in plastic.
Will

Will, that's a good one... I wonder what their reply would be! Funny you should mention that... someone asked me about those at the cub scout meeting last night. It looked like a cloud passed across their face when I told them how much they are "worth". And then some people wonder why there is such a demand from consumer protection measures...

-Allen

I'm not so sure about that...there are sellers on ebay and stampwants that seem to get some sales at some pretty unbelievable prices. When you check feedback, it appears that there is some degree of active buying.

For the most part, I'm a live-and-let-live kind of person, so if someone chooses to spend their money in this way, so be it. I myself would not want to be sitting on an "investment" of stamps purchased at 500 or 1,000 times catalog, but who knows? Maybe this bubble won't burst...

lets focus here and help bc with his question.

Agreeing with Spock, and if I could offer some testimony to the
encapsulation or "slabbing" topic. It's been around in coins and
sports cards for a couple of decades now, and I have no knowledge
of those hobbies, but I can speak on slabbing of high grade, high
end comic books.
1999, CGC http://www.cgccomics.com/ , began soliciting their grading
and slabbing process. The basic tennant is that a comic book would be
reviewed by 3 graders, notes compared and a final grade assigned to
the condition of the individual comic, then encapsulated. The idea was that the graders were, and are, offering a third party independant opinion on the condition of a comic. It makes negotiation
between a sellar and buyer easier. Both recognize the authentication,
so it comes down to price negotiation. I had account # 10011, that is
the 11th commercial account CGC issued, and while I no longer buy and
sell slabs actively the market being too volitile, I have bought and
sold thousands of slabs in the past 10 years. THAT company has still
not fallen from collectors graces, and are still respected, but some
do view slabbing as a hobby sin, when you are asking $20,000 for a
comic book, certification is the only way to go.

towards2112,
I have absolutely no problem with certification, whatsoever... but, what good is a $20,000 comic book that you can't read? Or a $10,000 stamp that cant hold in your tongs and look at as closely as you want and then put it back in the album next to all the other stamps that put that one into context? Now, this is definitely a personal issue, to be decided by individual collectors, but my preference would be not to have them slabbed, nor will I ever assign more value to one that is. What other collectors choose to do is entirely up to them... they should however be fully informed of all the information and opinions available before making such a decision, and that is the value of discussion such as this.

Incidentally, I think Spock was being funny (is he ever serious?), by trying to get us back to finding out whether or not anyone has ever slabbed a full sheet. Since you've mentioned that entire comic books have received this treatment, I guess it's not too much of a reach to believe a full sheet of stamps could be.

-Allen

So I take it that since slabbed stamps are MNH, slabbed comics are MNR (mint never read) ?