New Member - Hello, Inherited A Massive Unsorted Collection

Hello

I'm a new member and quite new to the world of stamp collecting. Been doing alot of reading, and have begun to sort the collection I have inherited. I do have questions regarding the best way to present and organize my stamps.

I have a car crash of a collection that I have inherited with no real themes or time spans the previous collector was interested it.

I would like to sort out and have a collection for myself and sell off the excess so someone else can enjoy them and build their collection with.

Regards

J

Welcome J! I hope you share your journey with us. Personally, I kind of like "car crash collections". You never know what might turn up. You likely already know that this forum is packed with helpful and knowledgeable people. Enjoy the ride.

Welcome, and feel free to share some photos to give us a sense of what you've got!

Welcome!

With respect to your question about organizing and presenting, one of the things I've learned as I've gotten back into this over the last five or six years is that as I learn and get more information I end up changing directions. I made some mistakes by being impatient and rushing. And for me at least, I actually have to try something and then see how my thinking evolves.

It's kind of a self-discovery thing where you learn what you're really interested in and what you're not.

Hello. The first step is to sort what you have. Most of us do it by area and country, eg GB, British Commonwealth, other European countries and colonies etc. You can then start sorting chronologically, and you may develop some idea of what you want to keep. If some of the material is in albums, that should give you a start - don't remove stuff from the albums in the first instance. Find a big table!

Sorting is first. Once you have an idea of what you have you can start to see how you want to store them. Albums, stock books, glassine envelopes... Google image search does a great job of identifying stamps.

Expect to have a lot of duplicates. I don't keep dups, but a lot of people do.

Welcome to the forum J Stamps 93. Lots of helpful and knowledgeable people here.
Regards
DavidR

Welcome to the forum. Great group here that will try to answer your questions. Since this particular area is the "Introduce Yourself " area, you passed the first test. Congratulations. When you begin to ask questions or show examples, you should either start a new thread just for that topic, or search for a similar thread, and add your own thoughts to the end of that thread.

I'm interested in what you consider a "massive" collection. Some people here have smaller, specialized collections of, say 2000 items. Others have truly massive worldwide collections of 300,000 plus items. I'm also interested in whether you are starting with albums, or boxes of items in glassines. In any case, glad to have you here.