I Bought A House From A Dead Person And Found Thousands And Thousands Of His …

I bought a house from a dead person and found thousands and thousands of his lifelong collection of stamps. What should I do with it?!

We are in contact with swedish organizations and clubs but we dont know what is what here… so how do you start telling valuable stamps apart from "trash"

Should we keep stamps that will not be able to be sold now for that in 30+ years it "may" become valuable…

I want the fastest and most profitable way of getting these stamps of my hands.
Thank you all in advance


*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

Welcome! If it was me I would look for a local stamp club and ask their help. It is always better to have someone local to give advise, especially since you are not familiar with stamps


Peter

"Fastest" and "most profitable" typically are not included in the same sentence.

It depends upon how much time you are willing to put into it. If you want it gone quickly, probably the best way is to contact multiple dealers and take the best quote, but it won't be most profitable.

More time will be needed to get more money, likely to put it in an auction house (philatelic auction house is best).

It depends upon whether there are individual quality/valuable items (condition is key), or just a lot of bulk lower value items.

Waiting for another 30 years will not likely increase the value for common material, as it will still be common and cheap.

You can post some pictures here of the breadth/depth of the material, and SCF members here would likely provide much more useful advice.

Thank you for your good replies!
We have turnt to local clubs but now as per your tips also looking into action houses!


This is only one of the hundreds of albums. This album has every country collected very vintage.

More tips and replies are gladly accepted.
Well met !

"Fastest?" AND "most profitable"? -

Don't forget that this collector spent decades building this collection. Knowing what is in it would take a lot of time of study and it sounds like you don't want to do that.

Just haul it to 2 or 3 dealers (and let them know you are shopping the collection) and let them make a bid. Good luck.

Agree. I'm not seeing a lot of value, as these appear to be home-made albums with very common material. Just get offers from at least 2 dealers before deciding.

Hello. What you've shown so far is more ebay than dealer/auction house material - i.e. a few albums grouped together and sold as job lots. But there may be better to come!

On a few of those pages there look to be a lot of spaces where stamps used to be but have already been removed, so maybe any more valuable stamps have already been removed and sold by the previous collector. In the first photo, it also looks like normal hinges were not used but instead some type of glue or paste which will make removing the stamps very difficult.

A treasure hunter or hoarder may enjoy this type of "collection" but don't expect to get very much value out of it.

Of the hundreds of books that you have, are they all of this same type of homemade album, or are there other different types? It is possible that the collector bought these stamps as "approval books" to pull stamps out of for his main collection, and those are the books that we want to be looking at.

So far there is very little of monetary value here. A tough sell.

What is commonly known as a "school boy" collection. Stamps soaked off household mail. Minimal value.

I agree they look like they are glued down. That would pretty much make them worthless.

Is that a collection-quality description? Does a "schoolboy" collection stop being that after reaching 10k or 50k or 100k stamps?

I disagree, the aren't "glued down" but on hinges as can be seen in a couple of pictures where hinge remnants are present.