Inherited A Massive Collection, Here's Some Of It

So what at this point do you think you want to do with the collection? As mentioned you have the start of a fun collection right there, at least for the US. That appears to have more varieties held and at least some perhaps in better collecting quality (for instance, if the mint stamps from the 30s were stored in good conditions)

Are you thinking about continuing some portion of it, say the US?

Or are you asking for advice about some particular aspect of the collection - sell? keep and rehouse? keep and store as is, etc.?

There is a general familiarity to what you are showing, especially among those of us who went down that same road.

What you have shown on these two pages started out as what is commonly called a "schoolboy collection." It usually began as a worldwide album such as the Scott's International or, in this case, "Junior International," with sparse representation except for a few countries. Unless the young person had an international connection, such as a friendly relative overseas, the spaces in such a collection were filled with "packet material" from stamp packets purchased from department stores or, depending upon location, a local dealer stamp shop. Among the foreign there is little chronological clustering of material, with but a very few exceptions. Mostly, the spaces are filled with whatever material was affordable and interesting for one reason or another at the time. It is a hit or miss approach to collecting based more on whim than a plan. But as the child grew older, he became impatient with the slow progress his pocketbook would allow and tended to jettison the foreign in favor of a focus on domestic stamps which were readily available in great variety. And those stamps could be purchased without paying a markup premium, only requiring a trip to the Post Office. At first.

Even though it was the Great Depression he managed to pick up a few sheets at face at the P.O. Why not, when the wisdom of the day had said they would always be worth what they cost since anything you could not sell could at least be used for postage. Never mind that the blocks had no place in that old bound album, that's what those glassine mint sheet albums were for. And with a stamp collector in the White House all kinds of interesting things were coming out, such as souvenir sheets and the many odd configurations for collecting them. And all that collecting enthusiasm reigned supreme right into the war years. But when the White House collector died, and only some of the buds came back from the war, it just wasn't the same. This piece of childhood went into deep storage and long term memory and only the collector continued to celebrate life. Until, eventually, he did not.

With the discovery of what was and how it came to be you have it in your power to change that, adding new content to the story.
What will you do with that power?

Ahh the pictures from the album bring back memories from when I bought my first scott international part I with older stamps. Before that I only thought of stamps as large colorful pictorial. Showed me the beauty of classical stamps even though none were specifically rare.