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

Sunday morning just before Christmas and sitting here having coffee on this cold Florida morning . Time for a good story with your coffee .

As ROGDCAM posted above --- "everything collectible has a sine wave of demand over time " We all seen this in the philatelic market place with many stories of expensive stamps but did you know it also happen at the bottom of the philatelic market place .

Let me explain my story about stamp value demands .

Back in the late 1980's ,I was a active stamp collector and buying mixture lots at public stamp auctions . It was a fun time to building a worldwide collection .Lots of stamps cheap, stamp collecting was on the down stroke. I had the big end of the stamp auctions box lots to myself at bargin prices
So I started selling in the stamp newspapers box lots starting at $8.00 a box of about 400-500 stamps with $1.00 postage . I was selling hundreds close to a thousand boxes a year ,it was like a steady business to open the mail box each day after work and having orders and checks coming in . .

This went on for a few years, my problem was I was keeping too many stamps ,filling country stock books and red boxes full of glassines .

I build a wall of cardboard boxes of unprocess lots from all the stamp auction purchases and wife was telling me enough was enough . The wall of boxes over the years just kept getting higher and higher .I was having fun and sometimes I spend a day before a stamp auction to compact the boxes so to make room for new purchases .

Going into the mid-1990's was the bottom of the cheap stamps market on the sine wave and I had a few million stamps with a value of less than 1/2 cent per stamp but was selling at 2 cents each , Happy times for being a mail order stamp dealer .

I was going to Greg Manning Auctions New Jersey ,Kelleher in Boston and every Rasdale Stamp Auction in Chicago. My full size Chevy Blazer never left a stamp auction only half full ,it was packed with boxes

Then the SINE WAVE shot straight up . What I was buying at $300.00 to $400.00 for a full truck started to cost me $1200 to $1600.00 ,so I quit buying because ebay started up and that picked up to the point where my $8.00 mixture boxes started going for $30.00 to $40.00 at public auction and again I could not list them fast enough . The top of the price wave of cheap stamps was 8 to 10 cents per stamp in the boxes I was selling

Wife was happy .

I always like reading hobby recaps! Compared to the cost of other hobbies and other things to do, collecting stamps are a pretty good bargain. One can still get a packet of 3,000 different world stamps from a mail order dealer for about $35 or a pretty good bag of stamps or a country mixture to go through... A penny apiece!

Many old used US stamps in the 3 cent to 8 cent range can be had even cheaper. I agree with you floortrader about the box lots. Many people love those and the $50 box lot is now getting harder to find. There's still stock coming in though for sure. But like you say, resellers gobble lots of it up.

Of course fewer collectors also play into this. I find this particular Applebaum's corner interesting in that regard https://www.apfelbauminc.com/apfelb...-volume-110/ Gosh, I would love to see a "mob of kids" at the stamp show I manage...

Nice picture ,tells you a lot about that generation .

Other things notable in the photo are that none of the young ones are obese and they are all dressed well. I love that era from stamp collecting to cars.

I wish I knew then what I know now. Or could have seen into the future. I was in Cub Scouts and we traded stamps just like Baseball cards - one for one.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to one and all.

There is a new listing for a up coming stamp auction at CHERRYSTONE , it is for a 72+ volume WORLDWIDE COLLECTION ,all printed in Steiner Pages .

Opening bid is $23,000 or better understood at $28,000 with fees .
The purchase price is way too high for this lot .Unless there is something lacking in the description.

First both you and me don't need a list of all the countries in the world ,I can sell you a group of stamps from the same countriies for $15.00 never mind taking half the describtion to say the same thing .

My favorite part of reading the description is "a few volumes of no commerical value " WHAT? spending $27,000 for NO COMMERCIAL VALUE . What are you telling me the bidder ?


There is no explantion for number of stamps , no statement the collection is intact or has some countries been pulled ?

The only positive part is the "hundreds of stamps catalog $100.00 + " ok that leaves too much open to guessing , is that one stamp per country or are there complete sets and strong countries or loose . I can't see paying half catalog for a few hundred random stamps ,again no details and nothing to judge this lot , no hundreds of scans .

Books of no commercial value plus half catlog for random stamps is a NO GO for this offer .

Rasdale Stamp Company sold a lot like this a few years ago broken down into four auction lots with all four lots realizing a total for four lots about $8,000 or less .

Of course I had to check this out... Lot #1471 At least there are some photos... should be lots more!
https://www.cherrystoneauctions.com...tartlot=1101 for 72 volumes 50K stamps aren't very many. That's a lot of Steiner pages though.

LANDOQUAKES ---- My math just doesn't work for that opening bid asking price .

First they established no value for the pages and binders .{I value those at $30.00 each but that is me .}

Second those 50,000 stamps {are they all different ?] retail sells at 10 cents each ,so that is $5,000 retail ,wholesale maybe 4 to 5 cents each ,so that is half of the $5,000 .

Third is the hundreds of $100.00 + catalog , lets use $150.00 per stamp and use 300 as a total . That comes to a catalog of $45,000 , but you can buy $100.00 catalog stamps at 1/3 of catalog and run out of money well before the sellers run out of stamps to sell you . A purchase at public auction should be 12% to 18% again ,I factor thoses at twice what you need to pay .

So with my math it is over valued at the opening bid by 100% maybe a price at $8,000 to $11,000 if it got lots of better stuff .

Cherrystone is always on the high side and don't seem to mind passed lots. In fact, they must have one of the highest pass rates in the stamp auction world. The polar opposite of Siegel who always underestimate the large lots and the bidding mostly ends up in many multiples.

Siegel often does not include any photos or specifics. You need to go to their offices and view the material. This is their ultimate protection.

Some examples from a recent sale (no catalog images for the lots):

Interesting - what do you mean by ultimate protection?

Viewing or registering to view it means you are fully aware of condition and contents whether you actually looked at everything or not.

ROGDCAM ---The lot describer at Siegel who wrote "Contains stamps not normally found in this type of collection. " plus "Contains many high cataloging stamps and numerous complete sets " speaks directly to my soul . Sounds like a collection I could spend hours looking at .

What does this mean"Then the SINE WAVE shot straight up"