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.

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.