I collected stamps for about 20 minutes, once, in 1980. My Grandma gave me a ton of stamps from all over the world which promptly overloaded my senses and I forgot about the whole thing. Grandma didn’t forget. She saved those stamps and gave them to me last week and told me to pay off my student loans with them (via Ebay or something).
There are dozens of them, all from the mid to late eighties. Most are cancelled, some of the US ones are not (like the roll of 8 cent US flag stamps). Most are still on the envelopes they were mailed in. They come from Ghana, Uganda, Syria, Thailand, Norway, Chile, Japan, India, Spain, Italy etc. etc. My Grandparents organized conventions globally in case you’re wondering.
Do I try to remove them from the envelopes? Is a Scott guide the best way to appraise them? What sort of total value might I be looking at?
Also, if any Dopers are avid collectors, I will give them first dibs (in case they really need a cancelled stamp from Jordan circa 1988).
Leave them on the envelope, but it really won’t make any difference. They are gonna catalogue between .02-.10 each. You’d be better off working an hour at McDonald’s.
I am a hack of a stamp collector.
Mine are in a box in my closet, but every once in a while I like to take them down and look at them. I find them pretty.
I say add to them ( it’s free!) and a great way to remember your Grandma once she kicks the bucket.
You can google Stamp Exchange and swap with other stamp geeks out there across the world ( usually 10+ more) for whatever they have for something you have, all for the cost of a stamp.
This is a good thread to ask – so whatever happened to stamp collecting, anyway? Back when my dad was a kid in the '50s, just about everone collected stamps. And now I feel like he’s the only one who collects stamps.
The same thing that happened to baseball card collecting - supply and demand. Before the '50’s, only a few stamp geeks collected. Cancelled stamps were of no value, so they got thrown out. Combined with the fact that very few were made in the first place (especially before, say, the '20’s), that made those that remained valuable as collectibles. A few stories came out about extremely valuable stamps - Inverted Jenny and suddenly people started saving them. Supply went way up, value went way down.
With baseball cards, it was the same story. Mom threw them out, they got put in bicycle spokes, etc. A few stories leaked out about how rare old Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays cards were, and soon everyone was collecting. Right now there are boxes and cases of unopened baseball cards from the early 80’s on. Except for intentionally tiny releases of individual cards, there are no scarce cards from about 1980 on.
Serious collectors still exist, but their interests lie in 19th and early 20th century stamps, and baseball cards from before 1970 or so.
