Too Many Stamps? Is It Possible?

My partner asked me not long ago, after I bought some stamps on line, "don't you have enough stamps now?" And I start laughing as there is no such thing as "too much stamps".
Or is there?
Do you ever question yourself, ok, it's enough for me now...
Me, not yet...

Unless your garage looks something like this, I don't think they have much to complain about.



This photo posted by floortrader last year is allegedly from a stamp dealer's warehouse, but the fact checkers will point out it is not a stamp warehouse at all. Too bad.

Yeah, that's a bit too much...#128517;#128517;#128517;#128517;

Only "tens of thousands of dollars"?

There is a time to get what you have accumulated , sorted and organized. When is the right time ?

Tomorrow!

I have reached the too much point I am afraid. At 72, I have been accumulating / collecting ( and unfortunately, that is the correct order ) since I was 8. I even took my main w-w collection in 4 Blue Internationals to college. After 15 years with the Feds, during which I also started a part time stamp business, was a member of the Dolly Madison Stamp Club where the Hotchners were also members, and spent most Saturdays at Latherows, the 1980s saw me attain 3 GSW, one car I occupied being blown 30 feet in the air, a subsequent divorce, and then I was put on a lifetime disability, so I returned to my roots and became a brick and mortar stamp dealer from the early 1990s to 2017, when my partners thought it was time to shut it down in their 80s and 90s, and most of our clients had permanantly closed their albums. In a month of madness I bought our store foreign stock back from the auction we consigned nearly all the store stock to. So now I have two two bedroom, two bath apartments one top of each other full of stamps, postal history, supplies, and all the sports cards I stupidly bought during the pandemic.
I get my 50 APS Member Certificate early next year, and I have not bought a stamp in 5 years. I still buy some covers. At this rate, I will probably need to live long enough to get my 75 year APS Member Certificate to get everything properly organized, identified, and put up before I close my albums permanently, and my offspring try to sell it all on Whatnot, because they know absolutely nothing about stamps and were never interested. My son's memories tend towards falling asleep under a customer counter in the store while playing his Game Boy, and telling me I should have made more of an effort to get into Pokemon cards when they came out in 1998.
Oh well....

With rare exception I stopped collecting stamps at least 15 years ago. One reason for that was that I had a very narrowly defined collection focus: US airmail and aviation themed topical stamps. Only 150 US airmail stamps were ever issued, and the US aviation themed stamps I focused on numbered less than 50. On the other hand, I have continued to collect covers, and do not ever expect that to stop.

I have been collecting for about 20 years and I used to be horrified at the idea that some people could contemplate destroying any stamps however many kilos they'd got of the same 20 or 30 stamps. I now have 9 Albums of my GB collection.. 5 albums and growing for my Dictionary of philately collection, 7 albums of USA plus shed loads of stock books, about 20 volumes of catalogues,Stock books, Kilos of cherry picked through stamps on paper.
YES I think you can have too many stamps. Even if I had twice the storage space, I now see that I need to throw away some stuff, no one wants to sort through it looking for that elusive variety or watermark. So I will throw away kilos of Machins and GB stamps. there willt certainly include some rarities, but life is too short for me and other collectors to check it all. I don't need them, no one else wants them. they are going in the bin. Some stuff I will give to fellow collectors.

Noocassel: is the Tommy or any other stamp charities still active? Just because you ( and I ) have kilos and kilos of picked over definitive material does not mean someone else does not want it. I used to buy 10 or 20 kilos a year from Tubfrim and other European sources, then sent what I did not consider worth soaking and processing on to another, different charity. But that was in the 1970s to 2010 period. I know a number have ceased operation due to lack of contributions and buyers.
We also used to buy for our store 100 or so pounds of US material on paper a year from two local Catholic Nun groups who had older, retired Nuns who used to trim the stamps and sort them, put that ended when almost all the older Nuns passed. Another dwindling group, like stamp collectors, unfortunately...