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.

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.

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.