September 30, 2014

Saar – in bulk and not

I’m still busy with lots of sorting and a little bit of soaking – more info on this in my next post. I’m now working on the Saar, a former bone of contention for the Germans and French with a varying history of its nation status and the country to which it “belonged”. I don’t often see stamps from the Saar in my random piles of worldwide stuff, but I have found two separate eBay lots of stamps from the Saar from a favourite German seller over the years. One lot, seen below, was a fine collection of both mint and used with some light duplication. This is perfect for me, as it gives me a good pile of stamps for my own collection and it also gives me some stock for future trading. I would guess that there are somewhere around 100-150 different issues that are duplicated here, so I will have a nice start on a list of stamps available for trade.

One stockbook containing mint Saar stamps ...

One stockbook containing mint stamps from the Saar …

... and a second stockbook containing used Saar stamps.

… and a second stockbook containing used stamps.

Separately, I found a box of off-paper stamps in bulk from the Saar. A very bulky bulk, at that. Almost 400 grams of heavily duplicated stamps from only two definitive series. That means that I will have a few issues in huge quantities, so for these stamps, it will be extremely easy for you to find something to trade that I will be happy to take since I have so many copies of these stamps from the Saar that I am eager to trade. These off-paper stamps are very clean – you can see the work in progress, containing a large pile of stamps ready to go into storage and tiny piles of other stuff (one single stamp with gum, one single stamp that needs soaking but is damaged, a small handful of stamps that go into the soaking pile).

Used stamps from the Saar being sorted.

Because this lot is so clean, I am rapidly working my way through it and it won’t be long before I start on the next batch of stamps. Looks like a box of over 500 grams of off-paper Channel Island stamps (Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man) is up next – lots more interesting stuff to move into the trading pile in the future.

January 27, 2014

A mixture of stamps from Iraq

Iraq is one of the countries that I rarely see in quantity. In a random worldwide mix, you might get a stamp from Iraq here and there, but to find them in any large number, you usually have to buy an old collection on album pages. I found this mix from the Danish eBay seller who was the source for many of the other mixtures highlighted here (but a different Danish seller than the one who was the source of the Norway all-different mixes shown earlier).

The mixture contained 130 grams of off-paper stamps from Iraq. Most of them are from the Kingdom and Republic eras, but there are a few stamps from the Saddam era, as well as a few old stamps that are listed in the Scott catalogue under Mesopotamia. Here’s a look at them after I had sorted through half of the group.

A nice mix of Iraqi stamps.

Most of these mixtures I’ve bought from the Danish seller have been in very good condition, with a large majority of stamps ready to be catalogued without needing any further soaking to clean them up. This mix follows that pattern. The upper left pile is clean and ready to be catalogued. The upper right pile needs soaking, and the little group in the middle of them contains “misfit” stamps, one from Luxembourg, a couple from Libya, a registration label, etc. The lower left pile needs to soaked but they’re damaged so they can wait. The lower right stamps are gummed, and in the middle is a pile of stamps that will be soaked as soon as possible – these are, for the most parts, stamps from Mesopotamia.

I’ve been real happy with these mixtures. They weren’t particularly cheap, but they’ve been in better condition than the vast majority of mixes and they’ll be very helpful in building nice trading stocks from countries that aren’t often seen by the average worldwide collector.

A Saddam-era perforation error.

One surprising find in this mixture shows a perforation error. It’s not very often that you’ll get a major error like this in a random mixture – usually somebody will have already spotted it and will have removed it from the mix before selling it, but this is one of a few such errors that I’ve come across over the years.

January 27, 2014

A Zimbabwe mix with a nice surprise

I have been buying mixtures for many years with the intention of building a trading stock. In fact, I have bought enough that I have trouble sorting it all. In 2007, I found a mix of 110 grams of off-paper Zimbabwe stamps, purchased through a German eBay seller. I sorted half of it and put the rest in my “sort through it later” pile, and I finally got around to working my way through them the other night. This mix had a nice surprise held within.

A mix of Zimbabwe stamps with a nice twist.

Above you see the results of sorting through the remaining 50+ grams of Zimbabwe stamps. Most of the stamps in this mix were definitives, ranging from the start of stamp issuance in 1980, and continuing up to perhaps 1995. There were some commemoratives in the mix as well, along with some stamps with catalogue values that are relatively high by the standards of my piles of stuff (read this as “more than a dollar” – ha ha).

There is a single mint stamp to go in the gummed pile, a fine giraffe. There are two other piles, the larger pile is clean and ready to be catalogued while the smaller pile needs to be soaked to clean up remaining gum and paper remnants. My past photos have always been taken from directly above the stamps but this time I took them at an angle to do a better job of showing the relative sizes of the piles of stamps. The clean stamps are in the vast majority here – perhaps only 10-15% require further soaking. But the big surprise here is that there wasn’t a single stamp in the “needs further soaking but is damaged” pile. True, there are some damaged stamps in the clean pile, but not a single one among those that need soaking. What a surprise!

January 23, 2014

I wish all mixes were like this!

Here’s a quick look at a mix from Norway – I wish all mixes were as easy to sort as this one was.

If I happen to find nice large all-different mixes at a good price, I’ll often buy more than one lot in order to build up some trading stock for the future. This lot of all-different Norway stamps is one such “doubles” mix. I actually bought 3 different lots from the same seller, one mix of 800 different and two mixes of 680 different.

Almost all of the stamps will go directly in to the storage tin of stamps that are clean and ready to be catalogued. The tiny pile of stamps are those that need soaking but have damage, so they can wait. There are two larger piles of stamps that need soaking, one that goes in the “good” box and a smaller pile that goes in the “better” box, and then there’s a big pile that goes directly in to the storage tin. Yay, no extra work needed!

A nice mix of all-different Norway stamps.

I also bought a number of Denmark mixes from the same seller – 600 different, 800 different, 1000 different and 1200 different. Hopefully they are all of the same high quality and there will be a rapid addition of stamps in quantity to my Denmark trading stock.

November 29, 2013

Sorting a worldwide mixture

I’ve given you a couple of looks at interesting country mixtures that I have been sorting, preparing for the time when I am ready to start trading stamps. I decided I would sort a random worldwide mixture to show how I do that.

Sorting a worldwide mixture.

Above you can see a fairly unexciting mixture of worldwide stamps with sorting in progress. Nothing too wonderful, but even with a mix like this there will almost always be some stamps that are new to my collection, and I’ll find others that are good for my trading stock. I’ve mentioned before that I am quite picky about the stamps that I will declare “ready for trading”. I like my off-paper stamps to be clean on the back, and the majority of stamps in mixtures will usually need to be soaked.

I sort these stamps that need further soaking according to how excited I am to get them and how soon I want to soak and sort them. As I’ve said before, the handy way of naming this rough sorting method is “junk, good, better, best”. The upper left pile represents the “junk” pile, stamps that are either damaged or already present in my collection in such huge quantities that I can’t imagine ever needing more of them. Compared to the very nice country lots I’ve been sorting recently, you’ll notice that this group has far more junk stamps, probably about 20% of the whole lot. This is a fairly normal percentage for random inexpensive mixtures. Compared to the average collector, I’m probably a little bit more likely to consider a stamp to be damaged. If you’re not as picky as I am, you might be in luck – I’ll be saving interesting stamps that aren’t too badly damaged and grouping them in lots of 100, and I’ll give those a cheap value for trading purposes (1 cent each!).

To the right of the “junk” pile is the “good” pile. These are undamaged stamps from countries that I have in large quantities, roughly the top 60 or so. The lower left pile is the “better” pile, stamps from countries that aren’t as common, newer (past 10 years or so) and older (90+ years or so) issues from the common countries, higher value stamps, back of the book stamps (I especially like semi-postal stamps), and designs that are particular favourites of mine. And to the right of that pile, there’s a small group of “best” stamps. These are stamps that are present in my collection in fairly small quantities, small enough that they all fit in the smallest size of glassine envelopes that I use for sorting. These stamps are soaked and sorted first, whenever I come across more of them they go right on top of the pile I am working on soaking. I’ve been very busy with this sorting and haven’t done much soaking lately, so my “best” pile has now grown to about 750 grams that are waiting their turn at soaking.

The two piles to the far right are the clean stamps ready to be sorted according to country and put in their proper storage spot, waiting for the time in a year or two when I start cataloguing and counting them, preparing for trading. The gummed stamps are in the small pile on the top, and the clean used stamps are the big pile below that.

A printing variety on a $1 Canadian definitive.

One of the stamps in the “best” pile is a fairly common stamp, a $1 Canadian definitive from about 30 years ago. This copy, however, has a large printing flaw, a big red blotch that I haven’t seen before on other copies. I’ll set that one aside – who knows, perhaps it’s something that I’ll see again some day. I enjoy looking for varieties, and this one might just be something that happened in the same position on many sheets.

Sorting the gummed stamps.

The pile of gummed stamps ready for sorting was relatively small, so it didn’t take very long at all to get them sorted into individual country piles and placed into large-sized #6 glassine envelopes. This envelope of stamps from Greece is almost full, it will soon be time to place these stamps into 102A cards and in long red boxes.

Sorting the clean used stamps.

The clean used stamps made up a much bigger pile. Here’s what they look like when sorted into individual countries. On the far left are the countries that are the most common and are therefore stored in the largest steel baking tins. The bottom two rows are those countries that get stored in medium-sized baking tins. Above that are a couple of rows of stamps that get stored in the smallest baking tins. And above that are the stamps which are stored in glassines and placed in shoe boxes. Some of them go in larger #6 glassines, split up into gummed and clean used stamps, others are less common and are stored in #3 glassines without needing to separate out the gummed stamps.

This worldwide mixture was stored in a group weighing 100 grams. The sorting process above represents half of the batch. I’ll sort the remaining 50 grams and once those are done, I’ll switch back to some of the interesting country mixtures I recently picked up. It looks like Togo is on the top of that pile. Work work work work work ….

November 26, 2013

Sorting a mixture from Jordan

Here’s a photo showing the progress made so far while sorting another one of my recent mixture purchases. Like the others, it’s from a country that has been rather weak in my collection. In this case, weak enough that anything that needs to be soaked goes into the “soak it right away” pile.

Sorting a mixture of stamps from Jordan.

As with the others I’ve highlighted on this blog, the percentage of damaged stamps is pleasantly low. Once again, the stamps which need soaking but are damaged are in the upper left pile, whereas the remaining stamps which need to be soaked are in the upper right pile. The lower row contains the stamps which are clean and ready to go into my collection. On the right are the gummed stamps – there are more of these this time in comparison to the other countries I’ve shown. On the left, a nice pile of mostly definitives. There is much more variety among the stamps which need to be soaked, but I’m happy with these stamps that are already clean because I’m a fan of engraved stamps, and this lot contains a good number of fine two-colour engravings. There’s a single stamp in the wrong pile so far, it belongs in the Lebanon box. There have been a couple of Jordanian stamps overprinted Palestine as well, once they get soaked they’ll be put into their own glassine envelope since that’s a separate country listing in the Scott catalogue. I don’t have very many of those yet, so it’s good to get a few more.

Progress progress progress!

November 25, 2013

A quick look at a Syria mixture

Every now and then I’ll update you with the progress I’m making on sorting through my stamps, preparing for the time when I’m ready to start trading. Here’s a quick look at a mixture I recently bought of about 100 grams of Syrian stamps. As with the stamps from Lebanon I recently showed, this mix came from an eBay seller from Denmark.

Sorting a mixture of stamps from Syria is in progress here.

Again, this mix has a very small percentage of damaged stamps. The top two piles require further soaking. I mentioned earlier that I have four separate levels for these stamps, depending on how interested I am in getting them into my trading stock. I suppose the easiest terms to use for these will be “junk, good, better, best”. Stamps from Syria fit in the “best” group, stamps which I don’t get very often and which are first to be soaked. The top left pile are damaged stamps which would go into the “junk” box, maybe something I’ll go through some day but not while I have other things to work on. The top right pile needs soaking as well, but they’ll be done relatively quickly so I can strengthen my currently weak stock of Syrian stamps. The two piles in the middle row are stamps without gum which are ready to go into the completed piles – on the left are stamps listed in the Scott catalogue under Syria, and on the right are stamps listed a few pages later as Syrian stamps from the United Arab Republic. This mix even contains a few Issues from the Arabian Government, but all of those require soaking. You can see one of them on top of the pile to be soaked, an old Turkish (Ottoman Empire era) stamp overprinted with a couple of purple handstamps. There’s also a stamp from Sudan in that group! Every now and then mistakes are made by the seller during sorting and you’ll get oddball stamps which don’t really belong.

At the bottom are some piles of stamps with gum. On the left, stamps from Syria. In the middle, a stamp from Alaouites, one of a few I have come across in this mix. Alaouites was a division of Syria and issued their own stamps for a few years. The area was later renamed and given the name Latakia, and eventually Syrian stamps were put back into use there. All the way on the right is another misfit, this time a stamp from Tannu Tuva.

In all, I bought over 15 different mixtures from this seller, all of them from countries that would go into the “better” and “best” boxes if the stamps need to be soaked. This will help build my trading stock for a number of countries that were previously very weak in my collection.

November 23, 2013

Sorting a Lebanon mixture

At the moment, much of my time working on stamps is spent on sorting big mixtures of stamps. I like buying bulk lots – there is almost always something new for my collection, and I also get lots of doubles that build up my trading stock. I’m especially happy when I can find single-country lots from places that don’t show up too often in worldwide mixes. Let’s look at one mixture that I have just finished sorting, roughly 100 grams of mostly used stamps from Lebanon.

Lebanese stamps aren’t too difficult to find, but if I were to buy a pound of mixed worldwide stamps, I wouldn’t be too shocked if it didn’t contain any stamps at all from Lebanon. Maybe it would contain 3 or 4 Lebanese stamps, which would be kind of normal. Maybe I would get real lucky and there would be 25 stamps from Lebanon. On very rare occasions, I’ll find larger mixes strictly from Lebanon, and that was the case recently. I found a Danish eBay seller with many mixes from countries that I seldom see in bulk – among others, I also picked up mixes from Iraq, Syria, Jordan (all of these primarily postally used stamps), various Congos (a mix of mint, CTO and postally used), Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé & Príncipe, Guinea (primarily cancelled-to-order stamps), even a mix of CTO stamps from Benin, a country I very rarely come across. Nothing horribly exciting for classic stamp collectors, I’m sure they wouldn’t be too interested in CTO stamps, but I always say I’m happy to collect anything for which I have a catalogue. It’s even better if I can get a bunch of stamps to trade as well.

Here’s a photo showing my sorting in progress shortly after I got started. I like my used stamps to be clean, with no hinge remnants, no gum left behind, no warps and wobbles, etc. A very large percentage of off-paper stamps will get soaked again to make them as clean as I like them, but I’ll usually also find some that have been soaked cleanly already, so they can go straight into the country pile that will be ready for sorting, cataloguing and counting.

Sorting my mixture of Lebanese stamps.

The stamps in the bottom two piles are “ready to go” – the bottom left pile contains clean off-paper stamps and the bottom right pile contains gummed stamps. For Lebanon, these gummed stamps are primarily mint stamps, although I do have a few that are CTO. The other stamps in the top piles have gum, hinges or paper remnants that I want to remove, so they will need to be soaked. These stamps get sorted according to how soon I want to soak them. Damaged stamps and boring old things that are already in my collection by the hundreds don’t need to get soaked until I have absolutely nothing left to soak, so those stamps might have to wait a long, long time before they get their bath (upper left pile – in this case, I obviously don’t have a massive surplus of any Lebanese stamps so these are all damaged stamps). Stamps that aren’t damaged are put into three different piles depending mostly on how happy I am to get more of them – in this case, all of Lebanon’s stamps go in the “better” box. These stamps are in the upper right pile, a fairly large group because most of the stamps in this mixture have been hinged before. And the single stamp in middle? That’s a mistake, a stamp from Libya instead of Lebanon, and used Libyan stamps go in the “oh boy, soak it as soon as I can” pile because I rarely ever get any Libyan stamps. I’m always happy to get more and I want to get them sorted into my collection as soon as I can.

You can see that the pile of damaged stamps that need to be soaked is very small in comparison to the pile of undamaged stamps that need soaking. I’m very pleased with this mix, it’s unusual to receive such a high percentage of undamaged stamps in a random mix like this.

A baking tin containing clean stamps from Lebanon.

I’ve finished sorting through the 100 gram bag and the clean stamps have been added to their country pile. In this case, I have enough Lebanon stamps that they go into a baking tin, which is stacked with other tins. Once upon a time about 5 years ago, I bought a stock of various Lebanon stamps so I have a fair-sized pile of them now. When the other pile of Lebanon stamps receive their soaking, that pile will grow considerably.

The gummed stamps go into a shoe box – in this case the box contains glassine envelopes belonging to the countries which have their own baking tins. Once I get enough stamps in a glassine (in excess of 32 grams), I put them into 102A index cards, 20 per card, and they go into long red boxes. This way, the gummed stamps are never stacked, which can cause impressions (dents!) into the gum from neighbouring stamps. By the time I was finished sorting this mix, my glassine of gummed stamps was full and I had to put the stamps into the red boxes. I’ll show my various tins and boxes in a future post.

Gummed stamps go into glassine envelopes in shoe boxes.

By the time I had finished working through my initial sort of this mixture of stamps from Lebanon, my stamps ready for cataloguing totalled just over 150 grams. That’s probably around 1800 stamps or so. That means there will be quite a few Lebanese stamps in my stock of trading stamps. If your collection is weak in stamps from Lebanon, I might have some stamps you’ll be interested in!

November 23, 2013

What’s taking so long?

Why is it taking so long to make any progress on this blog? I’m still working on my stamps, building up a good-sized pile of interesting stuff before I start cataloguing things. The goal is to sort as much as I can out of the massive amounts of unorganized stuff that I have. I will buy a new set of 2015 Scott catalogues and will also subscribe to Scott’s Stamp Monthly in order to keep up to date with the catalogue numbers of all future issues as well. Once I have these new catalogues, I’ll begin sorting through everything.

I have a lot of stamps that are ready for cataloguing. I’m up to almost 70 Kg of clean and sorted stamps ready for work. I don’t like leaving used stamps on paper and I also like to remove any gum or hinge remnants off of used stamps that are already off paper. This means I end up with huge amounts of stamps that need soaking, but I do make progress on stripping out the stamps that are ready to go now. Of course, this method means that gummed stamps (mint stamps especially) end up in the “ready to go” pile right away, so my collection will be heavily slanted towards the mint direction at first. The used stamps will gradually make their way into my collection later on.

Most of my time now is spent on sorting through off-paper groups. Some of them can go right into the “ready to go” pile, others will need soaking first. I haven’t been doing too much soaking lately, but every now and then I will put another load of them in the sink and get to work. For the most part, however, I’ve been sorting the off-paper stamps into various piles depending on the priority I want to give them. I’ll make a post soon that gives an example of this.

I’ll start making posts more often to this blog as I get “warmed up” and closer to the day when I start cataloguing. Once I’ve gone through the catalogues, I’ll have stamps ready to trade. I haven’t decided for sure how to do this, because 70 Kg is a LOT of stamps, somewhere just shy of a million. Probably I’ll just go through the countries according to weight (yes, I have weights for the stamps sorted for every country). That means Canada will come first, then likely Germany, then perhaps Russia (I once bought a large group of mint USSR stamps so these ones are ready to go already). Check in on this blog to watch the progress!

April 17, 2009

Let’s trade stamps!

Welcome to my new stamp trading blog. It will be a while before I get my stamp trading website up and running – I have lots of sorting to do before I get to the point where I can start trading stamps.

I expect to start cataloguing my stamps within a couple of years. It will undoubtedly take multiple years before I have my initial catalogue work done, at which point I’ll be ready to start trading. I have enough stamps that I’m sure I’ll die before they all get sorted, and that’s OK. It will keep me busy in the meantime.

As a rough idea, I can point out the following brief stats (updated as of December 2023). I have my piles of stuff roughly organized according to whether the stamps are on trimmed paper cutouts or whether they are already soaked off (or have never been on an envelope in the first place). I still have 240 Kg of on-paper stamps to soak. Another 175 Kg of off-paper stamps need to be sorted – I am picky about how clean the stamps are, so any with hinge or gum remnants get soaked again, even if they are already off paper. About 95 Kg are already off paper and sorted according to country. These are the stamps I will start cataloguing soon, and that will make up the initial batch of stamps for trading.

I have made a start on cataloguing some of the stamps which have already been sorted – take a look at my Colnect page for a listing of this modest beginning. Once I have enough countries sorted I will be ready to start some limited trading.

Obviously, it’s not possible for me to know which stamps I have yet to soak & sort and which stamps I have ready to trade. But that’s OK, because my stamp trading methods are probably different from those used by most people. In short, I’ll trade for almost anything I have in one of my catalogues (and I have a LOT of catalogues). So, even if I already have the stamp, I’ll still trade something to get another copy. I’ll post again later to explain how that works.

I’ll also post about what you can expect to find among the stamps I have to trade. I do have some expensive stamps in my collection, particularly in my Canada MNH collection, but I am more interested in trading relatively common stamps. Of course, like most worldwide collectors I have lots of common postally used definitives from the usual major countries, but I have lots of interesting stuff too – I have large amounts of stamps from small countries like Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, etc., lots of mint stamps from Canada (my home country), Germany (including Berlin), Israel, Russia, etc., big piles of used commemoratives from Australia, Austria, Japan, Switzerland, etc. I enjoy snooping through auction sites online to find stocks that will give me good stamps to trade, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in this first batch I am now working on. I have found some decent stocks of Netherlands Antilles, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Swaziland, etc etc etc.

In the meantime, it’s back to my real job. This blog has been set up to give me a placeholder for future postings. I won’t post much now, but I’ll get around to working on it more in the future. Have a look occasionally to check on my progress, because as I get closer to being ready to set up my stamp trading website, I’ll be posting more about what I have to trade. I look forward to trading stamps with you!

Ryan