Inherited A Large Collection Originating In Guyana

Hi all, I've recently inherited my Grandfathers stamp collection. Yes another one of these threads. He was a collector for 90 years, and seemed to think it's worth something. It's a cool looking collection nonetheless!

I have documented the collection and have made a link via Adobe Acrobat. I enabled a text recognition feature so you should be able to search keywords too.

Lots from British Guyana, (where he grew up), so many countries I just don't know where to start. A point in the right direction would be a massive help. Here's the collection:

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aa...87c2a3f7a539

Without know whay direction it is you are looking to go in, it will be hard for us to point you.

Besides Guyana, it looks like Australia was his favorite.

Regarding direction to go in, just wanting some advice on if a collection like this is worth being valued, if it's a good idea to sell as a whole & if there are any stand out stamps there.. I'd love to keep a portion and keep collecting but we have to split it between 4 siblings. Yes lots from Australia too as that's where he moved later in life.

At a quick glance, I so not see anything exceptional. There are interesting items. The last 'Spain' page has a 1953 'Sorolla.' Unmounted mint is a key stamp for 'second century' Spain. Used, it still catalogues at € 25.

A problem having it valued is the presentation. At some point, a valuer will get tired of the haphazard presentation and stop looking for the interesting stamps.

Interesting NSK, what makes the presentation haphazard? is there a set standard for presenting a collection like this? Or is it the fact that there's just too many to go through?

I tried to categorise it best as possible with how it was laid out and adding the text search function in the PDF but I'm clearly out of my league.

what's the best stamp ID app?

For seeking an appraisal of a collection, a useful approach is to have all the stamps of a given country in order by Scott's catalog (or for Australia perhaps Stanley Gibbons). Gibbons publishes a single catalog for the entire British Commonwealth, however for other countries it will be necessary to acquire multiple country or region catalogs to cover every country. Scott's is simpler in this regard; it's purely alphabetical except for USA which is at the very beginning of Volume 1. It's just not used very much in Australia.

Arranging the stamps by country and catalog numbers also puts the stamps in (mostly) chronological order, so it doesn't matter which catalog you choose. Stamps arranged this way makes is easier and more efficient for the appraiser to determine which key stamps for each country are in the collection. The cheap stamps do not matter for an appraisal- only the better stamps, which are usually the higher denominations, will determine the value of the collection.

In the arrangement you have now, some countries are pretty much all together, but some others have a mixture of countries close together. And the stamps of any given country are not in catalog or chronological order. This would be a nightmare for the appraiser, especially given that most of your stamps have minimal value. Most collections are like this- mainly inexpensive stamps but with a minority of better items. Better items can be under $100, or they can be thousands of dollars. The better items in your collection seem to be mostly worth under $25, and there are very few of them. The only way to know what's there is to have everything arranged in a way that an appraiser can quickly review it.

The collection is more of an accumulation- there is no evidence that the original curator sought any level of arrangement or completion. Appraisers won't want to appraise collections that are accumulations as they usually have little monetary value.

It's a great starter collection- there are a high volume of stamps that once arranged would form the basis for developing a very nice world wide collection. If you have to split the (minimal) value of the collection with your siblings, you may wish to simply sell the collection on ebay and split the proceeds. Start low and let the market decide the value. Good luck!

The countries are sorted and there appears some sorting of sets. That is great. It however is dense and not always in an order. The order will differ. Most catalogues are ordered by time. Scott has a nasty habit of demoting ordinary stamps to back of book, because charity just is not something it understands (I refer to the nonsensical 'semi-postal' categorisation that is highly common in Europe and not considered a category). Stanley Gibbons keeps sets together.

There are several clips on the web from dealers that explain how they value collections. Part of it is looking for key stamps and completion. The dense manner in which you organised the collection - in itself nothing wrong with it - costs them time. Time is what they do not want to spend on valuing if there is nothing of good value. Making that jump out helps capture a valuer's attention.

I am not a valuer, but collect Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and some Spain. I noticed the 'Sorolla' because it is a 'key' stamp. I did not encounter Ireland or Netherlands. But that may be because the PDF was too large to go through. I did see GB, but without having a closer look for watermarks and specific printers, I did not see anything that drew attention.

Other than that, I expect this would be a very interesting collection for a worldwide collector looking to fill gaps. There is a lot. So that is great. But keep in mind that where a collector loves going through a collection to fill gaps, a dealer will prefer to sell it at a profit to someone before having had a thorough look at it.




This, of course, is I being impatient which an appraiser or dealer will be as well. If they are easy to find, I am quite happy to take a look and see whether there is anything in those two countries that jumps out at me.

Wow, awesome feedback so thank you all for such a detailed response. I totally understand that an appraiser will be spending hours with the collection and if it amounts to nothing, it's not worth their time. They probably get people like me all the time with hopes and dreams of stumbling across some rare anomaly!

If anyone wants to give it a detailed look they could be like a 'mentor' and could have a bit of commission if it gets sold. It could be worth their time, or it could not. Just throwing ideas out there otherwise I think it will just sit there, as it has for the last 10 years!

Also going through a large coin collection too and trying to consolidate those albums in the best way possible. It would be great to know what we are holding onto here!

Elonray, if you are unwilling to do some of the research yourself then it will be a game of "pin the tail on the donkey."

Until you understand how or why the collections are organized the way they are, it is best not to try and consolidate them. Perhaps there is a reason that Finland is in the same album as Russia and moving the Finland pages into the Sweden album may seem like an improvement, when maybe it is not.

The example above is just hypothetical, but aside from the organizational factor there is also increased risk of damage by moving things around too much.

Unless your aim is to learn about the stamps and maybe become a collector yourself, then by all means, take it apart and organize it how you want. Instead of by country, a lot of people collect and organize by topic: people, sports, animals, trains, waterfalls, etc. I know someone who has albums of stamps that are all just one color. I have a collection of stamps with slogan cancels and I organize the stamps alphabetically by the words in the cancellation, regardless of the stamp. If you want to take ownership and continue to grow your Grandfather's collection, the sky is the limit on options to organize it.

If your goal is appraisal and resale, I suggest keeping the albums as close to the original owner's form as possible because you could do more harm than good by reorganizing it.