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

Floortrader, Nice sets in South America. Glad to see these posts come back!

Floortrader - I have a lot of cinderellas and I'd like to sort them and display them at some point. Can you give us a few pointers on how you go about storing them. Do you divide then by countries then subject? I admit that project overwhelms me is some way. Thanks in advance.

MIRMAN -----I did my Cinderella stamps different than others . What I seen others do was to put them in glassines and put them in dealer 102 cards , others used a stock books with glassine strips to hold their collections .

I wanted to do something like the WITT COLLECTION , which is on-line .On his display he did research and explained about each page . So I followed his led and used blank Steiner Pages and wrote something about each item I mounted on a page .

Instead of putting pages in large binders and none of the countries other than a few could fill even a thin binder , I decided to go to Walmart and purchase those notebook binders that they sell for 29 cents and put labels on them for each country . I now have like 120 of those 3 ring paper binders sitting in a plastic egg crate which has binders with each country name in order . Remember each binder has less than 10 pages and many with 1 or 2 pages . Neat and easy to find as a reference file .

Floortrader - Thank you for the link that I saved for future reference. I have taken a small peek at this collection but will come back to it when I eventually start working on my cinderellas. I think this project will necessitate a lot of research to find out what it is I'm looking at.

Some of the crazy stuff you will find in my Cinderella collection . I always I am a strong believer in mounting your collection no matter what you collect .

GOING BACK INTO THE CAVE ----What is happening to this hobby ?

This is the remark I received from a fellow philatelist .

Looking at a few stamp chat boards ,looking at the A.P.S. and other stamp clubs , looking at the decrease of stamp shows ,bourse's and exhibitions . Lack of recent philatelic literature , I would say the hobby is shrinking ,but that is not the case .

Because the sale of stamps thru auction firms looks steady and in some regular cases purchases are strong and many successful sales with good prices . I just experience that last week at Dutch Auctions .

So pricing is steady ,sure a little lower than 2010 but stuff is moving .

So with the above changes ,you have to think everybody just pull back from the public side but still sales are good ,that is the reason I open this with "Back to the cave "

Are the 1953 Sudan Stamps real or cinderellas?

The 1953 stamps were officially prepared, but not issued, so they aren't Cinderellas. Referred to in a note in Gibbons.

floortrader. - The auctions that I have watched. The house estimates got blown away (4x in some cases) in multiple different auctions for strong material. I think someone or groups are "investing" in high quality stamps. The more common material went at minimum bid. But better material, money grew on trees.

STAMPDRAGON --- I read a article in a stamp newspaper about investing in stamps , the guy being interviewed was the owner of a major stamp auction firm .

He claimed that with $200 million dollars you could control the stamp market of classical stamps . If that is true now that figure is maybe $300 million . At that level there is some 10,000 different funds worldwide that could drop that kind of money . So it comes down to being a very small amount of money in the world of investments .Stamps is such a small percentage of the coin market and other hard assets investments .

Just watch somewhere someone will step in ,then it will be a mad dash for others to get in .

Any examples?

And what makes you believe it is 'investors' rather than simply well-heeled collectors buying this material?

I think it is a combination of both , investors and more wealthier collectors .

A lot of it is done behind computer screens ,so nobody knows who is active . Both private sales and lack of any philatelic newspaper activity to report on it . It is a philatelic world with no eyeballs around to spot it .

Look what just happen to A & D Stamps the biggest philatelic transaction in size {not value } and nobody knows where 594 red boxes went and where 312 binders disappeared too .