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

Building a large stamp collection is a long term job and every one but a small hand full can stay with the project over decades .

It is like your life gets in the way of your goal . Issues with health,family ,jobs ,friends and social demands all damper the effort .

Thanks everybody here ,this page on the Stamp Community Forum has hit 100,000 views today . So many people have helped to make that number possible.

Floortrader I love the Mozambique stamps. I know what you mean. I am trying to work as much as I can on my collection in my stamp area and have been putting in a lot of hours but my wife has been getting on me pretty bad because I am not spending time with her. Oops

"COMING ALONG FOR THE RIDE " We should make this a philatelic term .

Each collector and especially long term collectors have limits to their area of collecting . But when you pick up something that looks interesting but not in your basic area of collecting . In my case getting something you would not reach out and pay for but like it ,so in comes to you "for free " .

In my case I stopped printing Steiner Pages after 1970 . But do receive later material when buying auction lots . So I will print just that page as needed . I don't want to waste money and time printing up a lot of pages that I have no desire to fill .

Here is such a case ,nice stamps so I made a page for them because ,Ilike to say "THEY CAME FOR THE RIDE " in what I purchased .

KYLEB ---- I had that problem years ago , now in retirement she leaves me alone .

Got a e-mail from a person who read my posting the other day .

They stated Rasdale Stamp Company for years has been using that statement for years .

So that most likely were I picked it up ,so it has been used by them

"coming along for the ride "

I don't think Rasdale has a copyright on that one.

To use a saying for quality, collecting can be viewed as a journey and not a destination,

How to build a massive worldwide collection .

Start at a early age and never give up , even if it means spending 25 cents a week and your buying these for years .

Wonderful collection of vintage packets. They all look brand new, unopened. Nice.

As others have stated, I really enjoy reading this thread and come here regularly. I probably account for a couple hundred of those 100K thread views as I have read all 92+ pages.

I may be rather unique in my approach in collecting.

My US collection is a nice quality Mystic American Heirloom Hingeless Album set. I only have the more popular first 3 albums as I have no desire to collect past 1984 for the US. I also picked up the Back-of-the-Book volume. Finally, I picked up 2 empty matching binders that I have filled with Varios to cover all the color variants, pairs, blocks, postal stationary, and postal history that I have that the primary albums have no spaces for.

For my WW collection, I came to realize what I really enjoy collecting is the classics (1840-1940), including all the perf, watermark, color, and paper variants. This led me to think that again using Vario was the best approach given the unlimited flexibility with Vario. I originally started with 3 of the 4 inch binders with slipcases. I add 3 more 4 inch binders each time I exceed the capacity of what I have. I am currently up to 12 binders. I find that each 4 inch binder maxes out at 90 Vario sheets. A 4 inch binder filled with 90 Varios and thousands of stamps can get heavy. As I age, I will probably wish I had chosen the 3 inch binders over the 4 inch.

I use a label maker to print labels for each country or postal region, and a small piece of paper to mark the Scott #, condition, and any faults of each stamp. Higher value stamps have their value and year of value on the identifier paper. The identification of the higher value items is more for my wife or children for when the time comes to sell my collection someday when I am gone.

I am also a self-professed spreadsheet and stats geek. Not that I know all the fancy tricks, but I find spreadsheets very powerful and useful for basic tracking and calculations. For every stamp I clean, identify, and place, I have recorded its Scott number, description, condition, and value.

When I first started reading this thread, I could tell you how many total stamps that I had, but not how many unique items I had. That led me to add another couple of columns to my spreadsheets that were basically checkboxes to denote unique so I now have a constant running total of unique items.

Again, my focus is the 1840-1940 classics, but like Floortrader, and I am sure many others, I hold on to items that come along for the ride when I pick up a collection. So my goal is to get as many pre-1940 unique stamps as possible, but my count does include others. All of my purchases target classics only, but others definitely come along for the ride and are kept.

I am currently at 31,700+ and steadily climbing. Once my spreadsheets were all updated, and I had the current count of unique items, I really came to appreciate the magnitude of what Floortrader (and others) have accomplished with a life of collecting. As my name says, I took a long 40 year break, but I am back with a vengeance and add to my collection almost every single evening, and love doing so!

I'm almost following you to a tee 40yearBreak, Mystic Heirloom volumes, spreadsheet tracking, (10,108), and reading this excellent floortrader thread. I make my own pages for African colonies, use my dad's Minkus master global for the rest, and somewhere along the line I picked up a Minkus Canada album too. I stop somewhere in the 1950 - 1960s for the WW, and 1984 for US. It was nice to move my teenage paperboy earned stamps into the Mystic.

I retired last summer, and I have sorted down my years of careless stamp buying to less than 3000. I'm a little more advanced then my teenage start, and learning more all the time. Next up move closer to the grandkid and figure out what to do with all the duplicates.

40yearBreak

I'm a fellow 'bean' counter using spreadsheets. Keeping up with a count is not a hard goal in my collecting, but I just like to know as a part of my collecting experience what I have

At 31,700 an impressive number of 1840-1940 stamps, assuming a few are those that came along for the ride.

Someone on the 'Filling spaces' blog came up with 91,000 stamps issued from 1840 -1940. Also, someone said 57,000 were issued prior to 1928.
A random search on internet says 80,869 were issued.
I guess it depends on what is counted.

Scotts 1840- 1940 volume is supposed to have 35,000 spaces. A goal for many is to just fill it.

The same search states 92% catalog less than $100.00 each. Maybe assume lowest priced version.

floortrader

Memories of packets. Great to see.

On the packets where the stamps were visible and the number of stamps was low, a couple look like they have been added to or taken from.

Great to go down memory lane. I have not seen in 60 years.

Eastriver,

I do like many stamps in the 1950-1960's, so I have no problem when those come along for the ride in a purchase. The 1970's for the most part is where I really start to not care for the design and styles.

Thinkstamp,

Thanks for those numbers. I find the 91,000 stamp count from 1840-1940 to be the most interesting. Do you know if that number only include Scott major numbers, and none of the minor lower cased letters? And I assume it does not include any of the cases where distinct colors or perfs are called out but not even assigned a lower case letter? Like I have seen many others state on Scott numbering, I wish they would be more consistent on what they assign numbers and letters to.

As I said earlier, if Scott calls it out as unique, even if they don't assign a unique number or letter to it, I count is as unique. I do not have a count of unique top level Scott numbers that I have 1840-1940. It is probably about 1/2 of the 31,700, so I imagine I still have a very long way to go to get to that 91,000 number mentioned. All part of the fun journey!