The Typical Collection

Most of the business of professional stamp dealers consists of buying stamp collections from collectors when they have decided to give up their collecting due to age or illness or financial constraints. Then we break these larger collections down into their smaller components and offer the smaller units to our customers through our public auctions or Buy It Now Sales. In the course of an average month we would buy typically 75-100 different collections from different collectors most of whom are older men and most of whom had collected stamps for most of their lives. This is what the typical lifelong collection looks like: Fitting in three cartons the collection has ten to twenty albums and usually consists of a United States collection and one or two other countries, often British Commonwealth, Canada, Israel or sometimes UN. There are often several volumes of First Day Covers and many collections have a few volumes of some kind of Postal Commemorative society stuff that the collectors subscribed to before he got wiser. And then there are new issues. Most US collectors have years and years of mint sheets from the postal agency representing thousands of dollars cost. It is this last area that presents the greatest problem for sellers and buyers alike. There is increasing difficulty with the postage component of collections that we buy because the postage market is very slow. Older US postage exists in far greater quantities than will ever be needed for philatelic purposes and is sold to the postage user market which is requiring less and less of this material as it is becoming harder and harder to use. Thus postage prices are dropping. As a collector, you would be wise to discontinue your USPS postal subscription today.