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 few months.  It will undoubtedly take multiple years before I have my initial 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, which is fine.  It will keep me busy in the meantime.

As a rough idea, I can point out the following brief stats.  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 135 Kg of on-paper stamps to soak.  Another 70 Kg of on-paper stamps need to be trimmed before I start soaking them.  Another 145 Kg of off-paper stamps need to be sorted.  About 30 Kg are already off paper and sorted according to country – I’ll start cataloguing those soon, and that will make up the initial batch of stamps for 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.  Decent stocks of Netherlands Antilles, Faroe Islands, Greenland, etc etc etc.

In the meantime, it’s back to my real job for the rest of the summer.  This blog has been set up to give me a placeholder for future postings.  So, 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

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