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 ….
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