Category: Stamp country list:
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 stamps from the Saar …
… 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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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