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

This thread sure has diverted from the original topic.

I believe this community is open to letting the members decide what direction the discussion takes and welcomes anything related to philately .

Don did a great job for many years and was a model to what is acceptable here and he let many postings go in the direction members wanted to go even when it was off subject .

It was not intended to be negative but the thread title does not reflect the general topic anymore.

I don't think it went way off topic. The post is about 330,000 stamps (different) in one collection. But really it is about how one puts together, a good WW collection. How you present that collection is certainly relevant. How you mount your WW collection is also important. It is very interesting to see how people go about putting and displaying their WW collection.

Sometimes the bigger challenge for me is storing stamps than getting them… I think I use just about every and any means! If one wants to collect the world, space is serious issue I've seen a couple Harris runs that have pages completely crammed and I commend those able to achieve that

Since nobody wrote a book ----"How to build ,maintain and develop a huge worldwide collection " we are all left to our own method.

What is surprising is how many of us really end up doing the same thing as each other and take the same approach because of what is avilable or what we seen at a stamp bourse or at a stamp auction .

Cost becomes a factor especially at the early stages of collecting .

As the collection grows then more effort is put into it of how to keep stock or duplicates .

At the top is the 102 or 104 dealer cards and the seperate stockbook with glassine insert rows on pages .

At the bottom many collectors start with regular mailing envelopes with a country name on each envelope and kept in a box .

In the middle we have various methods that most collectors work their way into .Some like myself like the standard 3 ring manila stockpage with pockets . I keep a set of three ring binders each binder has letter on it from A to Z . As a binder gets 6 or 12 pages from any one country then I transfer those stock pages to a seperate binder and put the country name on the back of the binder and keep it on a seperate bookcase .

So my decent size collection is maintain in three sections ---The stamp albums , the red boxes for sets and better stamps ,then the 3 ring binders for duplicates . Everything can be found at a momments notice .

I am sure others have their own methods which they found works best for them .

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Floortrader - sounds like an opportunity to write just such a book! I'm sure you have much knowledge, experience, and wisdom to impart on other collectors. I'd buy a copy...

Same here!

I think a book would be nice , maybe someday . This forum would be a better place to test ideas and develop the frame work of a book .

Let me continue with this thought .

What do I have , do I have this stamp . you ask ?------ To tell you the truth ----- I have no clue !

Every worldwide collector who has put together a large collection of worldwide stamps gets to a point in their journey to where they can't remember what is in their own collection .

It is true as most of us started with a album of 100 or 150 pages ,so it didn't take long to eyeball each page and understand what we had ,those were the day of just looking thru our album before going to the stamp shop, stamp bourse or the Woolworth's for the H.E.Harris Honor-Bilt packets .


The issue starts to blurr when the collection gets to a size where your not flipping pages each week , that number of stamps is somewhere between 50,000 different and 100,000 different stamps . Then it gets more diffcult when you cross a number even higher as a collection cross 140,000 at that point your buying lots of duplicates in anything you touch .

What compounds the problem is your looking at stamps in various places and these help you to confuse the issue of did you just see a stamp or did you see the stamp in your collection the mind starts to overload on where you seen it ,in your own collection or on line or at a stamp show .

The problem of knowing your collection compounds and get foggey as you view collections at stamp auctions and on line collections . Somewhere above 120,000 ---140,000 different you at a total lost without pulling a album down from a book case and clearly know you have it or you mentally seen that stamp before .

A number of times I have purchased a set only to find that I already had it. I usually kick my own a** when that happens.

I hope there is a chapter "How to keep track of which spaces are filled" in floortrader's upcoming book! I'm only collecting Big Blue up to volume 5 (1965) which is only 60k or so stamps I think, but couldn't imagine trying to commit that to memory. Also it never occurred to me until just now, but couldn't imagine how anybody could keep track of that without a computer. What did collectors do before home computers?

Personally what I do: I scan the album pages into a PDF. Then I edit the PDF to mark which stamps I have.

TSMATX ---- Your idea works well for a country collection or a topical collection . But a worldwide collector would be spending equal time on their collection and equal time doing inventory of their holdings .....so it wouldn't work for me .

When I am working on stamps I also have a level II screen showing financial market quotes thru out the day . Gee enough computer time .

I wonder how many worldwide collectors started like me with a album full of blank pages and a few pages with a lot of stamps . Some pages like France ,both Germany's , Poland and Russia filled fast . Then a huge amount of blank pages .
I set a goal of spending 25 cents to put stamps in each country then it was a goal to spend $1.00 on stamps for each country .Then into being adult it got into a few hundred dollars . After a few years it became buying specialised collections . After retirement it became find those countries that nobody has for a interesting worldwide collection .

I have to use software (StampManage) to keep track of what I have in albums but do not track spares (usually from lots). I do not want to get into the position that I am trying to sell spares consumes a lot of time.

The big key is to clear a second room for more stamps.