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

Alot of hard to get sets have overprints on them. You can get the stamps but not the over prints.

My goal is not just to fill a lot of pages in a worldwide collection but to find those stamps that most collectors just don't find or have in their collection .
My point is to find and purchase those rarely seen items ,but let me be clear it is not the most expensive stamps that I try for but those "pain in the butt " cheap stamps that collectors and dealers don't seem to have or rarely come across . So it is not a dollar figure to buy the most expensive stamp but those cheap stamps some how the philatelist community just missed .

To explain it better there was a stamp auction this week . They had a really nice Scott International Part 1 , The album was impressive with many pages filled and was just outside of my spending range but I decided I could fill a lot of spaces in my album .

So I got my 4 parts of my Scotts Intern. and sat down to view their album scans on my computer to my actual albums . Sure enough every place I had a blank space this album also had a blank space . At that price I was buying 95% was duplicates .

My system for keeping track of my WW collection:
-I have a document for every country
-In it, I type all the catalog numbers of the stamps I have, separated by commas, with separate headings for Back Of Book categories, like Air, Postal Tax, etc
-I have a date last updated at the top
-I have a line for 'up to date' with Yes or No for an answer (for some countries, I have stamps listed but have not updated the full inventory yet)
-I keep all of these on OneDrive
-At shows or shops, I can call these up on my phone as needed without carrying around papers.
-I've shared this space with my daughter, so she'll have an idea of what I have in case she ever needs to do something with my collection

Pretty simple, works for me, getting better over time.

Floor trader. I agree with your way of collecting. I find I do the same on a smaller scale with the countries I am collecting. Now I judge a collection based on many of "the hard to find sets" it has. Most collections in deed are all missing the same stamps. The trade-off I had to make was to not collect every country deeply. I only do this for select countries.

Floortrader, great stamps! I'm curious about the sets over the last page of this thread (Lithuania, AAT, Somaliland Protectorate). When you find these in a collection, is it usually the complete set all together where typically you would have had none of the singles (or maybe just a few) of the set before? Or is it more a matter of assembling the complete set from singles from different collections?

TSMATX ---- all those sets are from the inventory of A&D stamps

My guess is that this was the biggest inventory in the U.S. ,this was purchased by Kelleher Stamp Auctions .

I don't have the time to create a complete set ,too much work . I purchase complete sets at auction . I try to buy country collection and after remounting them ,then look for the key sets as a separate purchase .

I've been following this thread for quite a while and it's easy you guys really love the hobby. Although I don't collect worldwide, I've seen from the various sets you've displayed the hard work and devotion you have put into your collections. I take my hat off to all of you.

Of late, I've been filling a few of the large gaps in my Commonwealth collection by pucking up country lots. You can usually - with a little care - find them with a pretty much complete run of the GVI-QEII stuff of the type Floortrader showed for Somaliland, and a decent showing of the scarcer QV-GV material. I then get rid of post-independence stamps (my cut-off is independence or 1970, whichever is earlier) on ebay.

The mind set of some of these newer collectors is puzzling to me . They have some kind of mental block that only lets them buy stamps that they set at a fraction of catalog . It is some kind of crazy mind set like they only pay up to a certain percentage .

They don't collect to have a WOW collection or have impressive material it is like trying to get by with the bare basic stamps . Dealers have seen these collections hundreds of times ,the owners trying to get twice what they paid for the high catalog but low value collection .

Hey, we're buying the same stamps! Put together from a GVI album and a country collection.

Floor trader - general rule of thumb
cheap stamps only 5-10% cat
cheap stamps in nice album 10-30% cat
Better stamps 30-50% cat
Rare stamps 50-80% cat
Rare stamps pristine condition or one of kinds stamps
80 >100% cat

There are stamps out there though that are under catalogued and will go for 2-4X times the scott catalogue.

GeoffHa --- Nice pages ,don't have that set you have with the different paper .


GreenDragon ----Agree with your breakdown on percentage to catalog ,about right with what I been seeing .

I don't push for things like paper types, but if they're put on my plate, I'll take them. This must be one of the dullest KGVI sets - the next Virgin Islands definitive set is much more attractive!