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.

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!