Pushing 330,000 All Different Worldwide Stamps In One Collection .

It gets to be as much fun and enjoyment putting together cheaper stamps on a album page as much as putting those Canadian stamps above on a page in my collection .

This whole subject of building a worldwide collection is changing , this area of collecting has changed and moved on . We can not look back on how it was done 50 or 75 years ago , and hope to do it in the 2020's so listening to experts or opinions from people who done it 50 years ago is worthless .

I grew up listening to people who didn't collect Worldwide ,telling me it is too big of a effort and I need to specialize like them . Stamp dealers and club members all gave me advice it can't be done in the 1960's and into the 1970's .


If you look around the philatelic books and news article they are unbelieveable silent on the subject and total unhelpful for a simple reason ----THEY HAVEN'T DONE IT .

Maybe we can get AI to crawl through this topic and generate a book, credited to @floortrader, of course.

With WW what level of completeness and what year cut off. I decided to focus in on some countries but still collect the rest.

I want to hear how floortrader how he buys at auctions to put together a great WW collection

GreenDragon ------ I started out with 10 cent and 25 cent packets made by H.E.Harris of Boston ,purchased at a Woolworths in Chicago ILL. . Around 1973 started buying at auction at Rasdale Stamp Company . I believe my still active account makes me their oldest active buyer in 2025 .

It is not that I make huge purchases but it is the steady buying over many years that impress them . I have active accounts at 5 different firms and with all these firms they never have to ask twice for payment , my return rate has to be around 1 out of 200 lots ,so they all put up with me .

The key to building a large collection is to be organized and be a steady over a number of years . Buying a expensive stamp only impress people for a short time but being steady and buying nice reasonible price items over a long period is something people remember .

Have I gotten cheated on purchases -yes ,have I over paid for stuff -yes but it is all part of buying stamps . I try to forget my mistakes just like the millions of bad trades I made as a floortrader at the Chicago Board of Trade . I rather talk about the nice lot that was purchased at Dutch Country Auctions last auction and got a week ago than talk about a bad lot two years ago .

"number of years" That's the key. Lots of collectors probably have at least 100K different, in all kinds of ways of storing them. This takes from maybe ten years to a lifetime. Depends on how much time and money one has to spend. 200K different is a much higher bar but can be done with more time and patience. Competing diversions like covers and other specialty items play a factor too!

Agree LANDOQUAKES .

It takes a lot of years , because with most of us life gets in the way ,health, family and jobs becomes more important .

If you stay away from those 15,000 to 20,000 philatelic gems you see in every major stamp auction catalog, a steady purchase plan will result in a nice size collection ,now that also means you have to step up beyond that $20.00 W.W. mixture lot that you find on the side table of each dealer at a stamp show .

Also can safely say we all run into the same problems like money,space for a collection ,and time .

Love the bird set from Christmas Islands. Nice subject and beautiful colors. And then the item from Egypt, not a rare stamp but still a nice item to display on a page.

floortrader what themes do you focus on in your worldwide stamp collection?

Mirman --- Thanks , It is nice to add some off beat or odd item to a album just to give it a interesting item for non-collectors to look at ,it is easy with the self-printing Steiner pages .

Green Dragon ---- Right now working on filling gaps with complete sets ,as a young collector and starting out it was a "wow" factor in looking at anyone's collection . To me it was a step up beyond buying and mounting stamps from mixture lots .

@floortrader -- I also use Steiner pages for my WW collection except for Canada and France for which I use Scott Specialty albums. And you are right, no matter the size of your collection, the joy of completing a set or a page for that matter feels like a little victory.

I think that one of the hurdles for a lot of people is time. And to build a collection to a certain level needs commitment on a regular basis. If you work 6 hours on a rainy Sunday but then don't go back to your stamps desk for 3-4 months then it becomes challenging. I fixed myself a goal of adding 5,000 more stamps to my collection for 2025. I figured that to attain that goal that I needed to mount 14 stamps a day to get there and I 'force' myself to do just that. Of course, I am in no way near your collection size being at 23,768 right now and at 26.82% of my target for the year. I know that may sound anal to track it this way, but if I did not do it I would probably end up short.