As a pen pal and stationery collector, I picked these up on eBay a few months ago. There are over 200, all different denominations. They are all unused and a lot of them are in special protectors.
I had intended to use them to write to pen pals and send a few to my kids at our PO Box.
Now that I'm absorbed in philately, I figured I'd better find out if they have value unused before I go defacing them. By value, I mean to another collector, not looking to get rich.
Nullifying the value when they are important to the hobby isn't on my to-do list. However, if they're a dime a dozen, they will have great value in our pen pal collection when writing to my daughters.
I hope this makes sense. As always, thank you for any help provided.
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As is often the case with modern (post-1940) issues, these are worth about face value.
And the price prospects are dim, as they are bulky (relative to value) and expensive to store or display (relative to value).
https://www.upss.org/ ... the UPSS Circuit Sales would probably be the least expensive way to get them into the hands of people who need them to fill-out their collections
Please don't think of postal use as 'defacing'; instead, invest in a pretty calligraphic font (or, better, a course) and a Mailer's Postmark Permit.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey (UPSS 6572)
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
The postal cards with stamps added to them to cover rate changes hold little value. I would say that those could be used for correspondence.
Small-sized postal cards, like the 3 cent purple Statue of Liberty card are often rejected by the post office as they do not fit into the sorting machinery. Those you could find collectors for, or use them and place in the mail. If they come back, you'll get some ancillary markings on them that would be of interest to collectors.
Remember that true value of postal cards come with those with postmarks showing contemporaneous usage. This is noted in the Scott US Specialized Catalog.
If you want to sell them, you can make lots of them and post in the classified ads area. You can make approval books to post here, and if there are any of true value, post those in the auctions (or in the approval books too).
A word of warning on selling them - check break points for the number of cards that can be mailed without getting into a mandatory "parcel" category (over 1/4 inch thick). Minimum shipping cost on those is $3.50 I believe.
I once sold several individual postcards and it cost me over $2.00 to give them away JJ
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I recently shipped ~8 #10 covers to a colleague.
I pulled an old professional journal out of the building's recycling bin and, much as if you were smuggling drugs to a friend in prison, cut a 3-D space out of the middle of the journal that was large enough & deep enough to accommodate the covers.
I then sent the whole thing as media-mail-less-than-one-pound at U$D 2.75, mostly as a dumb joke (which got a laugh at the other end) ... but, if caught, it was my plan to channel my inner Abbie Hoffman and claim that it was a political act and, thus, protected speech.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
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