Kelleher Sale 759 - Collections, Stocks And Accumulations Of The World - August 6-7, 2021

And it is a good one.

https://stampauctionnetwork.com/V/V759.cfm

Check your email it's actually in August.

August 6-7 (dates on SAN are wrong). Some very strong early French Africa in there - may be hard to resist...

Rasdale August auction should post well before Kelleher auction takes place so for once I don't have to guess. My cup runneth over!

Thank you for calling my attention to the correct sales dates. Kelleher's web page has the incorrect July dates as well. Oops.

Anyway, I think that it is a very nice sale. I have bookmarked a number of lots and many more intrigue me. Now I need to sell my Fisher Island house.

You never judge the health or direction of the stamp hobby from one stamp auction . But we discuss this before years ago . But the lack of country collection mounted on album pages and more important the decreasing amount of worldwide collections mounted in albums up at this auction is telling .

Again you can't say for sure but this auction clearly gives a good example of the trend away from worldwide album collections and the lower percentage of country collections mounted on album pages .A good percentage of the album pages in this auction are 50 0r more years old. The point I am making is there is a big decrease in album building .

I think (know) there are far fewer large WW collections coming into the auction market but I don't agree that there is a decrease in WW collection building.

The demand for my country collections on ebay seems endless and lately I've seen a significant increase in the number of others selling country collections on ebay. There are lots of people building collections.

Auction sales are a slow process between consignment and actual sale, so the collections coming to market were solicited a few months ago. I think Covid disrupted the supply because auction staff weren't going into owners homes as much for almost a year. In addition some collectors were dusting off collections and starting to collect again. IMO the big question is whether the supply of collections will go back to pre covid levels or not?

Wouldn't one expect that covid actually contributed to more unanticipated passings this last year than 'normal', in the elderly in particular? I would have thought that would mean more collections coming from estates than 'usual' too. I have not observed any perceptible bump in available material, so where is it all going?

There is a delay between when a collector dies and when their collection is sold - sometime many years.

The excess mortality for 2020 was on the order of 368,000 for all age groups (averaged) which is not that significant in a population of 350,000,000 people. On top of that factor what percentage of adults are stamp collectors and on top of that what percentage have substantial collections of the type we are referring to in this topic and COVID becomes an insignificant influencer in the available auction material equation.

The lockdowns, social distancing and everything else are of course another story.

368k is about 0.1% of the population, but the deaths were mostly older people. Collectors are aso mostly older people. So wild guess maybe 0.5% of collectors died in excess of normal. what is normal collector turnover? Another wild guess 5%. So the excess deaths would be around 10% more. Enough to perhaps matter but not huge. Your wild guesses might lead to a different result.

Yup, all guessing more or less. I have never even seen any real numbers for how many collectors there might be in the US which is understandable given that "organized" philately such as APS must account for a very small percentage given memberships reported.

The most likely reasons for the seemingly slimmer pickings being offered over the past year are the conditions both voluntary and involuntary created in response to the pandemic rather than direct illness and death.

Unlikely that COVID targeted philatelists that were engaged in assembling large Big Blue collections over the course of a lifetime. But maybe the CDC should weigh in?

Of course whatever excess collector mortality there was over the last year will lead to a corresponding deficit mortality in the future because once you die early you can't die again later at your regularly scheduled time.

Watched some of Dutch Country Auction today ,one thing I can say is the buyers are back and they got their checkbooks out . I was surprised by the steady bidding across all areas .

I think someone's losing it (maybe me)! I went to Kelleher sale 759 and the entire 1st day shows the items as "Closed" on SAN. The 2nd day is still open but what is going on?