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

The problem with a collection like this massive offering and we can relate to this is DUPLICATES .

Most of us already have established collections . Experience W.W. collectors after looking all those wonderful pictures and scans that have been offered . How much of this I already have ?

So if your willing to pay $20,000 or 30,000 per lot ,first that means you already have a massive W.W. collection , so you ask yourself what goes into my album and what goes into the duplicate box .

Now this also holds true for dealers too . Are you buying fresh material so you can call your old customers for a look or are you adding to the stale group of material you have and doubling up on that .

Thanks, Floortrader. To make my question more general, is there ever a large worldwide collection that is sold and kept intact? Your point about only experienced collectors buying these collections is a good one.

snopes said:




Given many pages pictured were replete with advanced fungal infestation which had already spread to some of the stamps (see image below), the buyer would be wise to get any salvageable stamps out of that collecton ASAP and get the pages themselves out of the house before it spreads to the rest of his/her collection.





Those 'mounts' don't look to have done the stamps any favours either.

ZENDO 59 ---Agree . The faster you control any mold damage the better .

I guess any buyer ,after receiving pages like you shown above. Would start by keeping those boxes of albums in a separate storage place . Would call a stamp supply company and order a few thousand 102 or 104 dealer cards . Getting all the stamps away from those pages and inventory everything would be my first goal .

Lots of work but the clean up is necessary .

It is the same method for you if you purchase a $20.00 mixture and dump it all on the kitchen table or a $109,000 massive collection , start sorting it out to your tryed and true method you already used a number of times .

Every collector keeps their own collection how they want . But sometimes you just shake your head and say nothing .

What you see is the mind set of "SOME DAY " ,collectors who for years say to themself . They will get back to it or/and Some Day make things look better and redo this or that .

It was not a surprise reading the stamp catalog where it said ,lots of stamps are loose or interspread thru out the album pages with stamps still in glassines just as they were purchased .
.The only way to understand it is the desire to work on your own collections fades long before your pocket gets tired of spend money on stamps .

Floortrader -- So if I read you correctly, I understand that you will keep a mint set as mint and a used set as used and not mix the two together? Would there be a stamp value that would make you deviate from this? Also wondering what you do with your duplicates? Obviously you sell them somewhere down the line but in the meantime what is your course of action?

Zendo - those damaged pages will be sadly familiar to those who've bought old collections in the UK. Too often they ended up in cold, damp attics (as opposed to humid spaces in the US).

The old guides to collecting will tell you not to mix mint and used, and it looks better if they're separated, but in the real world, you tend to stick what you have in the album.

MIRMAN ---That is correct ,I prefer to just add a additional page to the album for a mix set and separate mint from used, but I do mess up once in a while .

On the subject of what I do with duplicates , Some go back to the stamp auction firms and the cheap stuff goes to a friend who sells on ebay .
I plan to stick with buying complete sets and hard to find material .

Floortrader post from January 2025 - "Cherrystone Philatelic Auctioneers had on their JAN 7-8 ,2025 auction a lot #1471 . It was for a 72+ volume of three inch three ring binders which was computer generated album pages . So as your can see I am not the only one doing this . This was a whole world collection with stamps for a opening bid of $23,000.00 ,it did not sell .
My thinking was it was way over price at $23,000 .00 . First the auction house clearly states the binders has no commerical value then gave a poor description of what you got . 50,000 different stamps has a $2500.00 vaue. Then 200 or 300 stamps or sets over $100.00 . {lets use 250 different just as a example } so 250 X $30.00 value comes to $7500.00 so stamp wise , it is a $9,000 -$10,000 collection with their no VALUE for pages and binders ------Where the heck did they get $23,000.00 opening bid ?"

It appears that this collection (now described as 75-plus binders) has been relisted by Cherrystone in its current auction (June 25, 2025) as lot 1440, with a lower opening bid of $14,000.

Regarding that Cherrystone one, they have several videos on their site which gives you an idea of the scope of the collection.

It looks in far better shape than those Kelleher ones but has nowhere near the depth. Looks to be very patchy in the earlier stuff with a lot of the content being in the more modern issues.

https://auctions.cherrystoneauction...OT21190.aspx

SNOPES ---- Thanks for bring up that Cherrystone Auction of lot 1440 .

First let me say ,you have your right to call me a cry baby or just someone throwing negative comments about someone else's collection ,fair enough I will read and understand what you say ,say what you want !

That is a fake collection ----it was made to sell----I have a negative view of it

I didn't see any of the hundred dollar stamps , maybe you get a seperate volume of them or more likely a box of dealer cards .
If you tell me you got "hundred dollar stamps " and over 250 of them ,then I expect to see thousands of $5.00 stamps ,$10.00 stamps ,$20.00 stamps , hundreds of $30.00,$50,00 stamps .You get my point . Stamp collections are build over time and that means it is a climb up to $100.00 stamps . Please don't show me 5 cents stamps and then you got $100.00 stamps something is missing here .
Then lots of stamps on black pages what is that storage ?
There are thousands of stamps that are not worth 5 cents ,those are what professionals call "coming along for the ride" stamps only found in junk boxes , yea they are fun but please don't add them in any totals which was in this case .

That lot will sell for less than $10,000 not close to their asking of $14,000. I see they removed the worthless statement about the pages .Plus added another 50,000 to the total as 100,000 ,guess they read what I posted .

"First let me say ,you have your right to call me a cry baby or just someone throwing negative comments about someone else's collection ,fair enough I will read and understand what you say ,say what you want !"

Hmmm. Floortrader, I'm not being critical of you at all. Your candor is valuable in helping me learn about these auctions. I don't see anything at all impolite in commenting on a collection that is up for sale. You can't have "Caveat emptor," without somebody giving us the "caveats."

The main reason I'm on Stamp Community at all is because of your posts, with this thread being especially valuable.

I hope I didn't say anything to give you a contrary impression.

"There are thousands of stamps that are not worth 5 cents ,those are what professionals call "coming along for the ride" stamps only found in junk boxes , yea they are fun but please don't add them in any totals which was in this case ."

I ask this in all sincerity -- if you're collecting worldwide (as I do) don't you need the sub-5 cent common stuff as well as the higher CV material?

And I'm puzzled by the suggestion that such material shouldn't be "counted"? Do you mean that literally, that the number of stamps in the albums should omit stamps that don't reach a certain level of catalog value? I've only sporadically paid attention to stamp auctions over the years, but I guess I'd be surprised if an auction house actually excluded stamps from its count.

Or am I missing something obvious?

I hope you don't mind more questions about this. You say, "That is a fake collection ----it was made to sell----I have a negative view of it."

Do you mean that the auction house or a dealer somewhere assembled this collection solely for purposes of selling it and that it was never someone's private collection?

Would that be an economically sensible thing to do? Just printing the pages and putting the stamps in must have taken at least 2500 hours, I'd guess (conservatively, I think, but maybe I'm off).

If the person does get the $14,000 asking price, that would be about $5.60 an hour for all that work, even without taking into account the dealer premium and the actual cost of the stamps and the paper and ink for that pages.

Even if I'm off by 50% and you could get all that work done in 1250 hours, you're still talking about a gross return of $11.20 an hour -- with the pay being deferred for months or years while the project is being completed -- without taking costs into account.

Snopes - "Thanks, Floortrader. To make my question more general, is there ever a large worldwide collection that is sold and kept intact? Your point about only experienced collectors buying these collections is a good one." The hint to figure this out is to look at the bidder and how they bid. If the bidder only bids one time through out the auction, then there is a chance that the collection stays intact. If the bidder bids on multiple lots in the auction, chances drop significantly, as you are likely seeing a dealer buy it. The price that a large collection can go by also matters. If a collection goes way over estimate, the it is a sign that a collector is buying. Dealers sometimes but not always will follow the high end estimate and they have to turn a profit. Also look if they are bidding online vs on the floor. Collectors most of them likely bid online vs the floor.