Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Same here. These are pretending to be Approval Books but they are not.
We have a rule for worldwide Books:
G19. All items in any approval book must be directly related to philately and be in the chosen approval book category. World-wide and other non-listed categories must be posted in the "World Wide" category, and must be neatly arranged by country and/or topic.
G21. Multiple copies of an item are limited to three, except for offerings such as: collectible cancellation types, pre-cancels, color shades, etc., and must be placed SIDE BY SIDE on the same page.
G24. Approval books that are not compliant with the rules are subject to closure without prior notice.
Is it time for management to take a look at what is becoming in my opinion a worsening mess, and start disabling books where sellers slap stamps on pages in random order and call them "Approvals Books"? Is it really so hard to check them and act? We can live with Worldwide if there is a minimum effort made to apply the rules.
rrr...
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I second your views, they use to say if you can beat them, join them, well I added a third option, ignore them altogether. Can't remember last time I bought some stamps from any approval book but I can tell you when I will buy the next ones.
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I was thinking it was getting to be about time for Ralph's quarterly complaint about the sales platform.
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02:50:35pm
There are a handful of people who post well organized Worldwide books, those I check out, the others I almost always ignore. I don't want to list the people with well organized books in case I omit someone but I have picked up some wonderful stuff from these people. Some of the others are absolutely dreadful and look like someone just picked a handful of random stamps out of a box. I know time is involved but a bit of extra time spent might help them sell some of the items! Just my opinion!!
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Smauggie.. It would not be needed if rules were enforced. And shooting the messenger is just another way to justify doing nothing.
rrr...
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I think this is one of those subjects that is neither black nor white, but has a lot of grey. It is a fact that many sellers offer world wide books these days. I have been doing it (moderately) as well. It seems that there is a demand, judging from the sales and when I look to my own experience, sometimes it is a way to create a book where there is no other way if one wants to comply to the rules. For instance, I have been offering world wide books with (very) recent stamps. I know that many collectors look for the latest stamps, so it makes sense to bundle them. Otherwise they would end up 10 stamps in a book with rather uninteresting stamps that everybody already owns.
On the other hand, I also see books that are labeled worldwide but really contain just one or two countries with a few additions. Why not call it what it is: that particular country plus some others?
Finally, there is one seller who offers many WW books, poorly organized, but going through these books is treasure hunting because they often contain rare stamps for ridiculously low prices. Do I want to forbid this seller from putting such collections in the approvals? No. So that is what makes it so difficult, in my opinion at least.
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Some statistics
Total Approval items sold in March 2024.........19037 of which 8149 were from Worldwide Books ie 42.8% of total items sold.
Total Auction items sold in March 2024............1965.
The simple conclusions one can draw from the above is quite simply:-
a) "There is a demand for Worldwide Books" whether they be regimented or not.
b) The Approval system outsells the Auction system tenfold by number of items.
c) The idea for members to sell their duplicates to other collectors has been fullfilled way beyond initial expectations.
Like Topsy the Approval system has "growed and growed" mainly without major regimentation being enforced by the pedantic minority.
A big, big, big THANK YOU to all members who take the time and make the effort to produce Approval Books.
Some of us know the amount of time taken to produce a Book whether it be "detailed" or "just thrown together" and we appreciate the opportunity to add to our collection at very reasonable prices.
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06:49:35pm
Ian made some great points! The thing is that, except in rare cases where I just think something is just plain "cool", I stay away from newer material. I also have almost every common stamp for the areas I collect, which is why I went into precancels. So most of the material in world wide books has no interest to me. There is a fair bit of cheaper new material selling and most of it seems to be coming from the unorganized approval books. How about a compromise? Keep your approval books partially organized by country and put any duplicates together. That would take a bit longer but it does seem reasonable, at least to me! And you do see a fair bit of damaged material which is not supposed to happen!
I really shouldn't complain too much since I've picked up wonderful stuff from approval books!
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The key here is what harm is having disorganized world wide approval books doing to YOU. If looking at them bothers you don't look. I just put up 3 or 4 approval books and tried to keep them more or less in chronological order and it is not worth the effort. Bad enough a brokebn set ends up on 3 or 4 different pages but I understand there is no other easy way to do that. Why do you want to penalize all the people who do enjoy them? (JanSimon, Ian, ME and others. There is material in them that is just not available elsewhere. There are incredible bargains for those who like to buy at a very small percentage of catalog value. Why do you want to spoil what some members enjoy - just don't look at them.
Continually destroying the things people find enjoyable will make us end up like the Sheriff in Australia - is that what we want?
Sorry but if it is working the only thing tweaking will do is make it worse.
Sorry, off to take my meds.
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"It would not be needed if rules were enforced. And shooting the messenger is just another way to justify doing nothing."
There is an easy solution - we change the rules to accommodate all disorganized approval books if this is what most of us want
Looking forward to your WW approval book, Ralph :-)
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Amen to that Paul, there are a lot of us who feel that way judging by the number of thumbs up I get when I do comment. Ten above and 8 under "SLOW sales" - if they look at the sell through rates they may find that world wide books now generate less sell through than they used to, and single country sales for most are much lower.
I think we are like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons, all that is heard is "wa wa wa wa wa". Oh well. it was fun. I'll survive but will have to think long and hard about what I want to do in the way of approvals and auctions. I may just go back to listing everything on hipstamp. -I added 25 stamps to my store and it took about the same amount of time as listing them here and the the price there averages twice as much. I had also arranged my approval stamps by letter so I could fill the books quickly - now pulling them all off the page to sort by country, etc doubles the time. Very discouraging.
But I will continue to buy from my regular sellers, quantity may be less due to difficulty in finding things the way my brain functions With chaos it runs on all 8 cylinders, boredom makes a couple of them cut out now and then.
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"Cougar":
re:
" There is an easy solution - we change the rules to accommodate all disorganized approval books if this is what most of us want"
This is a really a good idea Cougar. If you cannot fight it, then join in! I will!
Then the title of the approval books could also be changed to "The Grab Box"'
Kidding apart, it seems, there is a consensus to not regulate books, and let anything go. So let us change the rules once and for all, to make the "no" rules fit reality. Why even have 100 stamps, many have found a way around it. Let us make Approvals anything one wants, and throw out the rules. It will make the life of the Approval non existant moderators even better. And I will stop suggesting ways to have better books...I promise.
For me, and others as well, there seems to be very little point to try to put together well organized books. I felt it was a Club, and not a commercial enterprise, and I felt that sellers owed some level of quality to fellow collectors.. That was my goal.
Now it is mostly a race to the bottom. (but there are exceptions!)
Those who were making an effort before have few incentives for competitive reasons, when everyone else slaps 100 stamps on a few pages, duplicates scattered all over the place, in any order whatsoever, calls it worldwide, and puts it out for sale as an new Approval Book, with often recycled material from prior books.
I may be exaggerating the situation, but yet, as Ian said, it still sells. Approvals outsell Auctions 10 to 1?
I was hoping the market would sort it out for the better. Ian is a firm believer in the market. My personal feeling is that anarchy will reign supreme when all is said and done.
Those who remember what it was like, and those who want another experience will go elsewhere.
In spite of everything, there are still some GREAT books with great material out there. Just fewer and fewer, and alas, for me, the experience is less rewarding, and limited to a very small number of sellers. I too have noticed a downward trend to sales percentages. "Siem" suggests it is saturation. Ian says it is lack of new members. I will add, it is a mostly a less attractive product. And it has no competition.
I am going on vacation and will not worry about it.
Rrr...
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There are certain bedrock scientific laws that govern our physical world, Newton's Laws of Motion, Maxwell's Equations, Quantum Mechanics and...
Stamporama Members fussin' and squabblin' over the Approval Book rules! 
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As long as the system requires all the stamps on each page to have the same price, books cannot be organized by catalog number or date of issue unless the seller is willing to offer everything in the book at a fixed price. Some level of disorganization is inherent to the current system.
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11:41:44am
"put any duplicates together"
This is all I want!! It is way too easy to pick up the same item more than once. If one is used and one is mint and that is why they are separated then that's OK! Please keep mint or used copies of the same stamp together.
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I have always had a problem putting books together when I have many stamps where I have both a used and mint hinged copy of the same stamp. If they are the same selling price I always put them together (next to each other), however when the Used one may be a 15 cent sale price and the MH one is 50 cents for example - I always knew someone would see the Used one first and take it and then see the MH one later. It could also work in reverse if someone starts from the end of the book and work to the start. They wind up with the more expemsive copy and they may have been OK with the less expensive copy. I have put a few books up in the past where I put a comment on the page indicating the buyer that the another copy of the stamp is on page "X". It does take extra work to do that but I did have one buyer once send me a message thanking me for doing that. It has been a while since I did that but I will try to remember to do that on future books.
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I spend a fair amount of time on each approval book that I post. I try to have an accurate Scott Catalog number for each item and keep each book to a theme whether it be country or topical. I have found that the sell-through for my books as a whole is worth the effort.
My sales through approvals certainly far outweigh the ones by auction certainly for general items.
I use the World Wide category for 2 things. If I have a small number of stamps from a variety of countries, I will use a World Wide book but will attempt to group and identify each country separately. The second way is when I am clearing out slow moving inventory and post entire pages of 25-30 stamps. Each page is therefore 1 item at a blow-out price.
My background was in retail sales and I am convinced that if a product is properly identified, priced and displayed it will usually sell.
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Remember the old days when you would get an approval selection in the mail of maybe 250 Mixed world wide stamps.
You were then where able to select the ones for your collection at maybe 2c or 3c each.
So why can't we do this with the approval books?
I do believe this would would be great for newer collectors and some older. Please not not take the fun out of looking for the missing links in your collection.
When I list approval books, I usually get buyers within minutes or an hour. Most books have 25 - 35 views and then they die with 3 or 4 days. Right now I have 16 books that are active, with 15 buyers.
I also sell on Etsy.
Cva59
Paul
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Easy Peasy... If the book offends you... Don't look!
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"Easy Peasy... If the book offends you... Don't look!"
THIS! I don't have a dog in the fight cuz I don't buy nickle stamps (absolutely no offense to those that do) but why do certain people feel the need to control EVERYTHING?
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I have been a vocal critic of the Worldwide Approval books for a long time. From the very earliest days of Approvals, when Worldwide was NOT allowed as a category, for well discussed reasons, it was felt that Worldwide would become unmanageable and create a a garbage dump. Current Management has chosen to keep worldwide. That is what we have. I too have a box of stamps that I can slap on pages in random order, and let the buyer sieve through if he feels like it. At stamp show, this is called the grab box and stamps are usually priced in the 5c to 10c range.
Same here. These are pretending to be Approval Books but they are not.
We have a rule for worldwide Books:
G19. All items in any approval book must be directly related to philately and be in the chosen approval book category. World-wide and other non-listed categories must be posted in the "World Wide" category, and must be neatly arranged by country and/or topic.
G21. Multiple copies of an item are limited to three, except for offerings such as: collectible cancellation types, pre-cancels, color shades, etc., and must be placed SIDE BY SIDE on the same page.
G24. Approval books that are not compliant with the rules are subject to closure without prior notice.
Is it time for management to take a look at what is becoming in my opinion a worsening mess, and start disabling books where sellers slap stamps on pages in random order and call them "Approvals Books"? Is it really so hard to check them and act? We can live with Worldwide if there is a minimum effort made to apply the rules.
rrr...
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
I second your views, they use to say if you can beat them, join them, well I added a third option, ignore them altogether. Can't remember last time I bought some stamps from any approval book but I can tell you when I will buy the next ones.
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
I was thinking it was getting to be about time for Ralph's quarterly complaint about the sales platform.
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This is my diabetic cat OBI! I think, therefore I am - I think! Descartes, sort of!
05 Apr 2024
02:50:35pm
re: I am sooooo tired.....
There are a handful of people who post well organized Worldwide books, those I check out, the others I almost always ignore. I don't want to list the people with well organized books in case I omit someone but I have picked up some wonderful stuff from these people. Some of the others are absolutely dreadful and look like someone just picked a handful of random stamps out of a box. I know time is involved but a bit of extra time spent might help them sell some of the items! Just my opinion!!
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
Smauggie.. It would not be needed if rules were enforced. And shooting the messenger is just another way to justify doing nothing.
rrr...
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Auctions - Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
I think this is one of those subjects that is neither black nor white, but has a lot of grey. It is a fact that many sellers offer world wide books these days. I have been doing it (moderately) as well. It seems that there is a demand, judging from the sales and when I look to my own experience, sometimes it is a way to create a book where there is no other way if one wants to comply to the rules. For instance, I have been offering world wide books with (very) recent stamps. I know that many collectors look for the latest stamps, so it makes sense to bundle them. Otherwise they would end up 10 stamps in a book with rather uninteresting stamps that everybody already owns.
On the other hand, I also see books that are labeled worldwide but really contain just one or two countries with a few additions. Why not call it what it is: that particular country plus some others?
Finally, there is one seller who offers many WW books, poorly organized, but going through these books is treasure hunting because they often contain rare stamps for ridiculously low prices. Do I want to forbid this seller from putting such collections in the approvals? No. So that is what makes it so difficult, in my opinion at least.
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06:15:39pm
Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
Some statistics
Total Approval items sold in March 2024.........19037 of which 8149 were from Worldwide Books ie 42.8% of total items sold.
Total Auction items sold in March 2024............1965.
The simple conclusions one can draw from the above is quite simply:-
a) "There is a demand for Worldwide Books" whether they be regimented or not.
b) The Approval system outsells the Auction system tenfold by number of items.
c) The idea for members to sell their duplicates to other collectors has been fullfilled way beyond initial expectations.
Like Topsy the Approval system has "growed and growed" mainly without major regimentation being enforced by the pedantic minority.
A big, big, big THANK YOU to all members who take the time and make the effort to produce Approval Books.
Some of us know the amount of time taken to produce a Book whether it be "detailed" or "just thrown together" and we appreciate the opportunity to add to our collection at very reasonable prices.
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This is my diabetic cat OBI! I think, therefore I am - I think! Descartes, sort of!
05 Apr 2024
06:49:35pm
re: I am sooooo tired.....
Ian made some great points! The thing is that, except in rare cases where I just think something is just plain "cool", I stay away from newer material. I also have almost every common stamp for the areas I collect, which is why I went into precancels. So most of the material in world wide books has no interest to me. There is a fair bit of cheaper new material selling and most of it seems to be coming from the unorganized approval books. How about a compromise? Keep your approval books partially organized by country and put any duplicates together. That would take a bit longer but it does seem reasonable, at least to me! And you do see a fair bit of damaged material which is not supposed to happen!
I really shouldn't complain too much since I've picked up wonderful stuff from approval books!
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07:12:58pm
Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
The key here is what harm is having disorganized world wide approval books doing to YOU. If looking at them bothers you don't look. I just put up 3 or 4 approval books and tried to keep them more or less in chronological order and it is not worth the effort. Bad enough a brokebn set ends up on 3 or 4 different pages but I understand there is no other easy way to do that. Why do you want to penalize all the people who do enjoy them? (JanSimon, Ian, ME and others. There is material in them that is just not available elsewhere. There are incredible bargains for those who like to buy at a very small percentage of catalog value. Why do you want to spoil what some members enjoy - just don't look at them.
Continually destroying the things people find enjoyable will make us end up like the Sheriff in Australia - is that what we want?
Sorry but if it is working the only thing tweaking will do is make it worse.
Sorry, off to take my meds.
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
"It would not be needed if rules were enforced. And shooting the messenger is just another way to justify doing nothing."
There is an easy solution - we change the rules to accommodate all disorganized approval books if this is what most of us want
Looking forward to your WW approval book, Ralph :-)
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09:42:18pm
Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
Amen to that Paul, there are a lot of us who feel that way judging by the number of thumbs up I get when I do comment. Ten above and 8 under "SLOW sales" - if they look at the sell through rates they may find that world wide books now generate less sell through than they used to, and single country sales for most are much lower.
I think we are like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons, all that is heard is "wa wa wa wa wa". Oh well. it was fun. I'll survive but will have to think long and hard about what I want to do in the way of approvals and auctions. I may just go back to listing everything on hipstamp. -I added 25 stamps to my store and it took about the same amount of time as listing them here and the the price there averages twice as much. I had also arranged my approval stamps by letter so I could fill the books quickly - now pulling them all off the page to sort by country, etc doubles the time. Very discouraging.
But I will continue to buy from my regular sellers, quantity may be less due to difficulty in finding things the way my brain functions With chaos it runs on all 8 cylinders, boredom makes a couple of them cut out now and then.
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
"Cougar":
re:
" There is an easy solution - we change the rules to accommodate all disorganized approval books if this is what most of us want"
This is a really a good idea Cougar. If you cannot fight it, then join in! I will!
Then the title of the approval books could also be changed to "The Grab Box"'
Kidding apart, it seems, there is a consensus to not regulate books, and let anything go. So let us change the rules once and for all, to make the "no" rules fit reality. Why even have 100 stamps, many have found a way around it. Let us make Approvals anything one wants, and throw out the rules. It will make the life of the Approval non existant moderators even better. And I will stop suggesting ways to have better books...I promise.
For me, and others as well, there seems to be very little point to try to put together well organized books. I felt it was a Club, and not a commercial enterprise, and I felt that sellers owed some level of quality to fellow collectors.. That was my goal.
Now it is mostly a race to the bottom. (but there are exceptions!)
Those who were making an effort before have few incentives for competitive reasons, when everyone else slaps 100 stamps on a few pages, duplicates scattered all over the place, in any order whatsoever, calls it worldwide, and puts it out for sale as an new Approval Book, with often recycled material from prior books.
I may be exaggerating the situation, but yet, as Ian said, it still sells. Approvals outsell Auctions 10 to 1?
I was hoping the market would sort it out for the better. Ian is a firm believer in the market. My personal feeling is that anarchy will reign supreme when all is said and done.
Those who remember what it was like, and those who want another experience will go elsewhere.
In spite of everything, there are still some GREAT books with great material out there. Just fewer and fewer, and alas, for me, the experience is less rewarding, and limited to a very small number of sellers. I too have noticed a downward trend to sales percentages. "Siem" suggests it is saturation. Ian says it is lack of new members. I will add, it is a mostly a less attractive product. And it has no competition.
I am going on vacation and will not worry about it.
Rrr...
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
There are certain bedrock scientific laws that govern our physical world, Newton's Laws of Motion, Maxwell's Equations, Quantum Mechanics and...
Stamporama Members fussin' and squabblin' over the Approval Book rules!
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
As long as the system requires all the stamps on each page to have the same price, books cannot be organized by catalog number or date of issue unless the seller is willing to offer everything in the book at a fixed price. Some level of disorganization is inherent to the current system.
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This is my diabetic cat OBI! I think, therefore I am - I think! Descartes, sort of!
09 May 2024
11:41:44am
re: I am sooooo tired.....
"put any duplicates together"
This is all I want!! It is way too easy to pick up the same item more than once. If one is used and one is mint and that is why they are separated then that's OK! Please keep mint or used copies of the same stamp together.
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Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
I have always had a problem putting books together when I have many stamps where I have both a used and mint hinged copy of the same stamp. If they are the same selling price I always put them together (next to each other), however when the Used one may be a 15 cent sale price and the MH one is 50 cents for example - I always knew someone would see the Used one first and take it and then see the MH one later. It could also work in reverse if someone starts from the end of the book and work to the start. They wind up with the more expemsive copy and they may have been OK with the less expensive copy. I have put a few books up in the past where I put a comment on the page indicating the buyer that the another copy of the stamp is on page "X". It does take extra work to do that but I did have one buyer once send me a message thanking me for doing that. It has been a while since I did that but I will try to remember to do that on future books.
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Auctions - Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
I spend a fair amount of time on each approval book that I post. I try to have an accurate Scott Catalog number for each item and keep each book to a theme whether it be country or topical. I have found that the sell-through for my books as a whole is worth the effort.
My sales through approvals certainly far outweigh the ones by auction certainly for general items.
I use the World Wide category for 2 things. If I have a small number of stamps from a variety of countries, I will use a World Wide book but will attempt to group and identify each country separately. The second way is when I am clearing out slow moving inventory and post entire pages of 25-30 stamps. Each page is therefore 1 item at a blow-out price.
My background was in retail sales and I am convinced that if a product is properly identified, priced and displayed it will usually sell.
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Approvals
re: I am sooooo tired.....
Remember the old days when you would get an approval selection in the mail of maybe 250 Mixed world wide stamps.
You were then where able to select the ones for your collection at maybe 2c or 3c each.
So why can't we do this with the approval books?
I do believe this would would be great for newer collectors and some older. Please not not take the fun out of looking for the missing links in your collection.
When I list approval books, I usually get buyers within minutes or an hour. Most books have 25 - 35 views and then they die with 3 or 4 days. Right now I have 16 books that are active, with 15 buyers.
I also sell on Etsy.
Cva59
Paul
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
Easy Peasy... If the book offends you... Don't look!
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re: I am sooooo tired.....
"Easy Peasy... If the book offends you... Don't look!"
THIS! I don't have a dog in the fight cuz I don't buy nickle stamps (absolutely no offense to those that do) but why do certain people feel the need to control EVERYTHING?
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