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

landoquakes - "Snopes, as long as proper hinges are used, I have never realty seen any damage other than too much slobber when hinging stamps with gum."

Thanks, that's been my experience too.

Agree ----- Using good hinges and learning to use the right amount of wetness to a hinge makes for a easy removal and the ability to reuse it when transfering it .


Here is another page made up today . No reason not to consider building a worldwide collection with each page having a complete set , kind of every page complete instead of having hundreds of pages naked with a few stamps . Sort of magic when you fill the page with a complete set . Cost is not a problem when it can be done with a $1.00 complete set or done with a $1,000.00 complete set .

This page cost me about $3.00 as you see it here .

Floortrader - "No reason not to consider building a worldwide collection with each page having a complete set , kind of every page complete instead of having hundreds of pages naked with a few stamps . Sort of magic when you fill the page with a complete set."

I love your approach to collecting, but individual tastes differ, to state the obvious.

I'm probably in a small minority, but complete sets don't do much for me. If I have a choice between two stamps of equal value, one of which would finish a complete set and the other of which would put a stamp on a page that is "naked," I'm going for the stamp that breaks new ground.

I enjoy the challenge of knowing there are thousands of naked pages in my collection, just waiting to be clothed with stamps.

Snopes --------Trust me I got a lot more NAKED pages than you or anybody else .I guess after 55 years of viewing stamp collections at all the auction firms that I visited on viewing days , I sort of slowed down when I seen a full page of stamps . No matter the value it was a stop point just to view it .

There was a newspaper article many years ago in a stamp weekly newspaper . About a interview with a employee at a major firm who was a senior describer . He talked about the many collections and albums that past thru the firm and how he viewed what collectors build .
He talked how collections were kept and what he liked and that influenced me .

"Snopes --------Trust me I got a lot more NAKED pages than you or anybody else"

Ha! You're probably right, your collection is amazing. But I'll bet I'm in the running for the top five. Just this morning, I was flipping through my hundreds of Barbuda pages, which are complete and almost completely empty.

My collecting methods would horrify the auction houses, I think. I prefer postally used, I hinge most mint stamps, and I've printed out literally thousands of pages that have no stamps on them, making the collection extremely bulky.

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent collection, and not just limited to common stamps by any means. But unless there's a collector out there somewhere who wants a near-complete set of worldwide pages up to the present, I suspect it will go for less than most collections of equivalent catalog values just because of the bulkiness of all the blank pages.

It does have the advantage of having a pretty good representation of 21st century stamps, which isn't that common in the worldwide collections I see at the auction houses. But again, that's not a popular collecting area.

21st century stamps have their fans and the quest for postally used ones can be surprisingly competitive, especially increasingly hard countries to find that are popular. Scandinavia, France, and pretty much everywhere. Germany might be more common than US for recent used!

In the article mentioned above the Sr. lot describer also talked about worldwide stamp collectors . He said many collectors start off as general collectors but later become focus on 2 to 5 countries and put their effort and money on those few countries . Leaving W.W. collecting to a second place interest .

landoquakes - "21st century stamps have their fans and the quest for postally used ones can be surprisingly competitive, especially increasingly hard countries to find that are popular. Scandinavia, France, and pretty much everywhere. Germany might be more common than US for recent used!"

There is definitely strong competition for unusual 21st century locations, partly because they become available so rarely. For example, I don't think I've ever seen a postally used stamp from the Serbian and Croatian zones of Bosnia (and I've looked hard for them).

Another frustrating thing about 21st century stamps is that the catalog values (or at least the Scott catalog values) for them are essentially useless. I believe the values are assigned as a fraction of the face value, which makes little sense for a postally used stamp. And then the values are not adjusted to reflect actual market sales for literally decades after the stamp is issued.

This causes a lot of absurd valuations. For example, as you mention, recent German used stamps are super common. A while back I bought a half kilo of German kiloware, consisting almost entirely of 21st century stamps. For these stamps, the self-adhesive variety is vastly more common than the old-fashioned lick-and-stick variety. I often will find 50 copies of the self-adhesive variety to every 1 of the water-activated gum variety.

But Scott always values the two varieties almost identically. That can't be right, based on what I've observed. The same variation in scarcity between self-adhesive and water-actived varieties holds true for Australian 21st century stamps as well, though the pattern is slightly less strong.

Perhaps the market has yet to care enough to create a difference in the pricing?

Most of the time, I get the gummed stamps when I buy stamps from a postoffice outlet in Germany.
As for those Bosnian stamps, I stuck those on postcards and sent them around the world. Both from the Serbian an from the Bosniak - Croatian parts of the country.

Cjd - "Perhaps the market has yet to care enough to create a difference in the pricing?"

No, if that were the case, recent stamps would all be valued at the minimum amount (25 cents in the Scott catalog). But that's not the case at all. Many recent issues have relatively high Scott catalog values, just because the face value of the stamp is high.

Many of Germany's recent stamps, which as landoquakes mentioned, are dirt common, readily available, but virtually all of them have relatively CVs in scott.

Here's an example that might help show that the level of demand does not correspond with Scott's CVs.

In the current ISWSC large circuit exchange program, which has been open for four days, there are 131 stamps from Antigua that were put up for selection by members. These are almost all older stamps, and almost all of them have very low catalog values, usually 25 cents and very few if any over 50 cents. Of these 131 super-common stamps, 124 have been selected for exchange by ISWSC circuit members -- about a 95% selection rate.

In that same round of the ISWSC large circuit exchange, by my very quick count there are 56 21st century Germany stamps listed for exchange. Of those 56 stamps, only 14 have been taken -- about a 25% selection rate.

That selection rate is far lower than the super-common Antigua stamps, which all (or almost all have a CV of less than 50c). But of the 42 unselected German 21st century stamps, at least 26 have a catalog of $1 or more and literally every one of them has a catalog value of at least 50 cents.

So, in this example, we have the Scott catalog clearly overvaluing common stamps that few world-wide collectors want. Why? Because they had a high face value, given the steady inflation of the value of the Euro.

There really is no reliable catalog value (at least in Scott) for 21st century stamps. That would just be annoying, but dealers rely on these catalog values in setting their prices on HipStamp, Stamporama, and elsewhere. That means collectors are overpaying for super-common stamps.

Yes, this is just one example.

But I assure you from years of watching this closely that the pattern is everywhere. Scott's catalog values are way too high for 21st century stamps, at least for postally used stamps.

I'm curious, Cjd. Do you collect 21st century stamps? If you do, do you think Scott's catalog values are based on any kind of market analysis?

NSK - "As for those Bosnian stamps, I stuck those on postcards and sent them around the world. Both from the Serbian an from the Bosniak - Croatian parts of the country."

That was smart of you. They are really scarce, I believe.

I was in Republica Srpska in 2024 and I tried to convince my wife that we should swing by a post office so I could dig through the trash to look for used stamps -- but she thought that might attract a lot of unwelcome attention. I don't know why, but I didn't even think of sending postcards.

I made the same mistake in Uzbekistan later in 2024, where I bought a lot super-common mint stamps, but it didn't even occur to me to send postcards so I could have the much less common postally used Uzbek stamps.

I am afraid none of the recipients cared about the stamps. They just wanted the postcards.

NSK - "I am afraid none of the recipients cared about the stamps. They just wanted the postcards."

Oh, no! Maybe I should get on your mailing list.

floortrader - "In the article mentioned above the Sr. lot describer also talked about worldwide stamp collectors . He said many collectors start off as general collectors but later become focus on 2 to 5 countries and put their effort and money on those few countries . Leaving W.W. collecting to a second place interest."

I haven't exactly done that, but I do focus much more on certain countries than others (like France, Brazil, and Ethiopia). But I still collect them all.