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

It's just a tough, great set you have there.

In my local club there are quite a few people collecting the world. No two are the same and some are much more disciplined than others. The interesting thing is that even after 60 years or more of collecting the world, they still find new stamps for their collections without trying very hard. quite a few are in the 100K-200K different range, with a few in the 200K-300K different range. Cutoff year matters and the ones that go right up to today will always find new material. I know collectors with Big Blue runs, Big Red, Minkus Specialty, Harris Standard, and of course Steiner pages. Haven't seen many long runs of Scott Specialty like I used to. The albums and pages for those get pretty costly. I do see some LInder aficionados too.

Landoquakes ---Agree with your posting ---"quite a few people collect the world. No two are the same.... " That is what makes it interesting to see what others have done and what they are working on . The exchange of ideas always improves your own method .of collecting .

One method I learned here on this board a few years ago , was using "D" ring binders . If your using one sided album pages it works well over the old "O" binders .

Stamp collecting isn't about what you have . Plus it is not about what you can spend . It is about what your doing with what you got .

Watching someone build a collection over many years and enjoying following them ,is what the hobby is about to the person working on those goals.

Very well said floortrader

We need more stamp collector's like you

Dianne

When we talk about W.W. collections there is two simplified categories . We have the comprehensive country collectors . This would be were most beginners start . The goal here would be to fill each page in the album , much like a collector who trys to get a stamp from each country . The collection would have a balance of all the countries.

The second group would be those collectors who collect countries In-depth . They could just specialise in a few countries or they can be worldwide wide collectors . Looking at what they got would get into different perfs and different watermarks , in other words they are specialist with the countries they collect .

I am sure you could break this down into more details but these are the two groups that I can identify .

I am a WW collector that specializes in US. I have accumulated many thousands of stamps from many different countries. Although I have collected for a good while I am still a beginner. I have separated by country all my loose stamps so I can start the very big endeavor of cataloging everything starting alphabetically with the A countries before I start putting together my albums. This will probably take over a year. One thing that stresses my mind is I have accumulated a lot of partially full albums and stockbooks/binders and I feel to do it right I need to remove all stamps to one day have a standardized set of binders with Steiner pages for my entire collection. What do I do? If anyone has any thoughts or advice on what I mentioned please share. Thank you.

KyleB:
I wonder if you are "overthinking" things a little.

When you say you want to catalog "everything" before mounting them in an album, do you have the full set of Scott catalogs to work with? Are you cataloging to identify the stamps, or the assess the value. Keep in mind that many of the stamps that "beginner's" will start out with have minimal value. Don't obsess with value.

Cataloging 100s or 1000s of stamps is going to take a lot of time, and may quickly become boring or tiring, and not as much "fun" as mounting them to really see some results.

You mention you want to create Steiner pages. Why don't you pick a country for which you have either a strong interest, or have a larger than usual quantity of stamps.

Create the Steiner pages for that country. Then group your stamps by decade or period, catalog them as a group, then add those you have identified into your Steiner album. Use the catalog for identification of stamps that look similar. Take your time. You said you had several different albums with some stamps. Work those one at a time. Repeat with each "old" or stocker album until you have exhausted the first country, then organize your duplicates. You may want to try and trade them later.

Now pick another country. Repeat the process. Don't worry about perfection.

You'll be surprised how much satisfaction you can get from just working one decent size country to the end of the stamps you have already collected.

Yes. One thing I'd add is that, when you come to sell your duplicates, old albums with ordinary stamps sell better than loose stamps, so try to pick the best example to keep and leave the duplucates in situ. Enjoy!

Mml1942:

Thank you for the advice. Those are great ideas. No I don't have a full set of scott catolgues. I realize this is something I probably need. A dealer I purchase from said he will give me his when he upgrades but I may not wait that long.

My concern is not the value of the stamps. I don't think about stamps as an investment I do it only for enjoyment. I realize 95% of my stamps are probably common with little value besides maybe a few expensive US ones I have purchased. But I want to catalog them to identify them. I feel I will never grow to an advanced WW collector if I don't even know for sure what stamps I have. I'm also hoping that through the process of identifying I can start to weed out some of the many duplicates and limit the purchase of more duplicates.

Also I am only 40 years old with very many stamps. Been collecting since 4 years old and I'm hoping I have many years left to build this collection maybe when I am an old man I can have a very impressive collection and be able to say I have 'X' number of different stamps maybe get to Floor's level lol. One can dream!

KyleB:

Since you don't have all the Scott catalogs (I wasn't expecting that you would), select your first several countries to match one that you might have, or buy a older copy of some edition that will have several of the countries you want to begin with. A ten year old Scott will cost next to nothing, and you can work through a number of countries from one catalog.

When you have worked a group of countries from a catalog from a range of letters (A-B, C-F, etc.) then move on to another catalog volume. From what you describe, you are not going to have many stamps from the previous 20 years, so old catalog is going to be fine to identify dates and Scott numbers and varieties like color and perforations.

Have some fun
Mike

Anytime the discussion gets around to how big a collection is , for some reason the Pegasus stamps of Uruguay usually comes up maybe because the country is not in the regular list of popular countries .

Very nice set, makes for a great page.

I find that it is extremely* difficult to put together sets from South America, other than Argentina. Almost impossible, at least for MNH.