"To paraphrase, Life is but a bird, and the bird of Life is on the wing. Hurry up ... Life is waiting."
Macravenmad I have a large Referance collection. macravenmad 15 Jan 2015 07:06:34pm
re: What's in your Album?
I've collected for 40yrs. I've sold two collections, once to get married, and again to have a down payment for a home.
I'm a world wide collocter. I use my scott and other catalogs to keep track of my collection. The second time I sold a collection was in 1992. I have 93 three inch binders which holds my collection. At this point I have 183,573 cataloged stamps. Of course being retired gives me time to work on my hobby. Yes I work on it every day. I have no idea of catalog value, but that is not what you get when selling.
Have a nice day and enjoy the knowladge collecting stamps gives you.
That's interesting that you were able to build up two collections and were able to sell them for enough for your wedding and down payment on a home Wonder if that is still possible in today's day and age?
Wow, 93 3-inch binders is a huge collection. Tell us more. Do you collect WW up to the present or a specific year cutoff? Are you using pages from a specific album, homemade pages, or Steiner pages?
What impresses me about these huge collections is that the collectors know exactly how many catalogued stamps they have. I have boxes and boxes that need to be catalogued. Check back with me in 10 years!
They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -Benjamin Franklin 16 Jan 2015 12:01:11pm
re: What's in your Album?
I'm with you, Don. I've been collecting for 55 years and would need to live an additional 55 to organize what I have accumulated (assuming I stopped acquiring now). I could probably sell my collection for enough to pay for a nice 14 day cruise to the Caribbean, but wouldn't have enough left over for cab fare from the airport to the port. But who knows, maybe mixed in with the cartons, boxes, old collections, and what not I have purchased over the years is a set of Hawaiian missionaries (the paper kind, not the flesh and blood kind).
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. -Edmund Burke"
Last year, I started using the Steiner pages for my WW classic collection. These pages have no stamp illustrations (but have spaces for all major Scott numbers) so you are pretty much forced to use your catalog to put the stamps in. The benefit of this, however, is that you can easily mark off the stamps you have in your catalog. I use an orange highlighter so I can quickly tell what I have and don't have. You can even highlight the price for the used or unused CV to distinguish whether the stamp is used/unused. This seems to be a pretty decent system without the need to enter all of information into an elaborate spreadsheet and keep it updated, etc.
Now, of course you would still need to count up everything you marked in your catalog to get total numbers, but it is doable. Also, since I only collect classic era, I only need a single volume catalog and just take it with me to stamp shows and have my complete inventory and want list with me.
Like Don and Bobby, I too am quite impressed at the knowledge of the number of stamps in ones collection! I started to catalog my Scott International 1840-1959 collection in an Excel spreadsheet. Forget about keeping track of individual stamps by catalog number. I just wanted to know how many stamps I had on each page or, even easier, the number of stamps for each country. That was too much!
So how big is my collection? That's easy: one footlocker, ten feet of bookshelf, and one roll-top desk.
Each time I think about cataloging, I find another stock page or glassine I need to sort, and that is way more fun! But then I've only been back into the hobby for a year after taking a multi-decade absence... So maybe I'll get caught up at some point and be able to inventory. Aw, who am I kidding: I'm accumulating material faster than I can deal with it.
To solve the problem of knowing what I need when I go to shows or shops, I've started taking pictures of my collection and taking them with me on a tablet. Then I can page through the pictures almost as if it were my album, and even zoom in to see if the stamp I already have is a temporary filler or a keeper.
Steve
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"What are you waiting for? Those stamps aren't going to collect themselves."