Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Like many stamp collectors, Mr. Blanding began collecting stamps at the age of 8 and had built up a sizable world collection of 25,000 different stamps by the time he finished high school in 1935. Also like many of us, his collection remained dormant during his college and early married years, but began to buy collections and sell his duplicates through the mail after World War II. He continued buying large collections, picking the best stamps out for his collection, and selling the rest. Here’s how Mr. Blanding described his collection in the article:
“My collection included issues only to 1975…The final collection included 98 percent of all major world stamps listed up to 1975 in the Scott Catalogues — more than 200,000 different stamps, all in mint or unused condition except for some high-priced nineteenth-century issues. It filled to near completion fifty bulging volumes of the Scott International series. It included the best copies from all the collections I had purchased over the years, so the stamp condition was usually exceptional on all but some of the early values. “
By 1995, approaching age 80 and not having the space for his large collection in the retirement home he was moving into, he decided to sell all his stamps. Incredibly, Mr. Blanding went on to live another 17 years after selling his collection, passing away in 2014 at the age of 97.
He never did say how much he sold the collection for, but he gave a clue at the end of the article by his statement, “…my five grandchildren obtained their university or other needed graduate education costs from that collection. It continues to contribute to our family today.”
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Nice story.
In a much more modest way I try to do the same: sell duplicates in order to buy (small) accumulations from which I take the stamps I can use for my own collection and then sell the remainder again. Or I buy from the approvals the ones I can use with the money I made selling. Bottom line is that it is a closed circuit: I need not invest any money, I only use the earnings from selling to buy new stuff. That way I do not get into an argument with my wife either :-)
What I do not do is collect worldwide. That would be far too time consuming and apart from that: I do not like stamps from Austria, Eastern Europe, Asia etc. (just to name a few). I must admit though that once in a while a new collecting area is started.
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i think time consuming is the key word,imagine collecting the whole world and selling stamps on the side to pay the tab ! I supplement my stamp purchases by selling stamps here and covers on ebay..looking back to 1987 i may have had one year where i sold more than i purchased.
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"i think time consuming is the key word..."
That's what immediately jumped out at me. The process of planning, finding, researching, procuring, negotiating, driving to and from the post office, not to mention working with the reference books and then the albums themselves. And on top of it, these weren't willy-nilly pick up the phone, "send them to me" type purchases. If he was able to buy, sell and acquire within the margins, that takes planning and effort.
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"i think time consuming is the key word"
I agree! Plus, I believe he worked his regular full-time job too! But, of course, this was over a 50-year time period too.
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12:05:34pm
Basically, you are describing a hobby that was run as a business, with all profits earned as a result of all that labour reinvested in inventory.
Even a modest $10,000 per year profit from the buying and selling could build a $500,000 collection over 50 years - plus the significant appreciation that occurred over the years into the 1980s.
Roy
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So running the hobby as a business could or could not take some pleasure out of the hobby side. Theres no way i could do the business side..it would frazzle me...but he must have had a system and the focus to do it.
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I used to have a posting board tag line:
eBay is like cocaine. At first it seems harmless but before you know it you are dealing to support your habit.
seems appropriate here!
eBay did get me back to stamp collecting in the good ole days. When eBay first started I decided to sell duplicates from my car dealer brochure collection. Back then you could do no wrong. Everything sold. Everything got multiple bids. Before long I was grossing $1000 a month.
Then I discovered the stamp category! Flush with my profits I found Scott 300B the booklet pane of my Franklin stamp! I had never seen one in person. I sniped it with a few seconds to go manually (there were no tools then) and I was ecstatic! Done, over with! I was hooked.
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I remember ! 1998 i did not have a scanner but everything i described on ebay sold ! I wish i could say the same today...i think the field is saturated !
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Exactly Phil! In those days I'd list car brochures from the 1970s and 1980s starting at $3.99 plus $2.99 postage. Everything sold and my average sale was $12.00. Over time, r
This market got saturated by clueless sellers listing them for a dollar with free postage. Nevermind that you couldn't mail it for a dollar! Soon it wasn't worthwhile to sell.
But when it was good it was great. It finances scanner, my first Sony Magical $700 digital camera, as well as the expensive stamps in my Franklin collection!
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Chris, As I think you know this is the same approach I've used in building my collection.
Unless one is rich I think it is the best and most logical way to build a large WW collection. I like to emphasize that I am not even close to being rich and that a very respectable World wide collection can be put together by most anyone with a logical mind and lots of time on their hands.
I do disagree with his estimation of 200,000 stamps through 1975, I believe it to be way off the mark and should be closer to 400,000.
Thanks for your order of those Guatemalan stamps you ordered today, they'll be off to you tomorrow and I will use the money toward some other stamp(s) I need.
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You can add me to the same boat that Antonio and the others are in. Buying box lots and collections, taking out what was needed and selling the remainder to use the money to buy more of the same a little over the past 40 years, not counting when I sold stamps to kids in the neighborhood when I was also a kid, is the manner in which I built my world wide collection.
I tend to no longer buy the box lots that are jumbles of unsorted common stuff. I just don't need that much of it, and the common stuff is hard to sell. I prefer to buy MNH country collections, or mixed country lots of MNH sets. The last couple of years I have been pouncing on many complete MNH definitive sets that seem to be coming onto the market more frequently than in the past. Maybe I just hadn't been paying much attention to those offerings. Still, it's nice to find them, because usually one gets a nice to look at, full album page or two out of those definitive sets. Plus while I usually already have several of the stamps in those sets, I get to sell them off to help pay a little for the complete sets while others get to fill in some spaces in their own albums.
What a vicious cycle this hobby is! Stamps keep revolving around from one collector to the next. It's like a feeding frenzy with sharks going after the chum!
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"Thanks for your order of those Guatemalan stamps you ordered today, they'll be off to you tomorrow and I will use the money toward some other stamp(s) I need."
Great! I feel like a part-owner in your collection
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I did some digging through my club's back issues looking for the original article. FYI, it's in the November 2009 issue, not February. Page 1044, as Chris cited.
I enjoyed the discussion here. May try selling some of my big box of duplicates soon. 
Mark
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Yes, sorry I got the month wrong. It was corrected on another site, but forgot to correct it here.
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""I do disagree with his estimation of 200,000 stamps through 1975, I believe it to be way off the mark and should be closer to 400,000"
"
There is a massive difference between the two sets of numbers.
Using data on Colnect I estimated 200,000 stamps through 1970, stamps 1971 through 1975 would not make up the balance of 200,00 in fact nowhere near it. I acknowledge that this number has grown since I last conducted my analysis which points to the Colnect database being in constant flux.
So which figures are we to take as being more accurate?
I find these fascinating discussions especially as a WW collector measuring % completion is something I periodically calculate and graph.
Maybe those using Scott databases would be able to provide some further estimates and advise the strengths and weaknesses of those estimates.
Regards
Richmond
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I wanted to highlight an article I recently read in a back issue of American Philatelist (Feb 2009; pp. 1044-1048) called “Selling Stamps Can Increase Your Collection” written by Forrest H. Blanding. In the article, Mr. Blanding describes his experiences during 50 years as a worldwide stamp collector and dealer. This is somewhat reminiscent of a much abbreviated Nassau Street by Pat Herst, Jr. But the interesting main point of Mr. Blanding’s article was how he was able to build an almost complete, mostly mint, worldwide collection at no net cost to him over his 50-year career as a stamp dealer.
Like many stamp collectors, Mr. Blanding began collecting stamps at the age of 8 and had built up a sizable world collection of 25,000 different stamps by the time he finished high school in 1935. Also like many of us, his collection remained dormant during his college and early married years, but began to buy collections and sell his duplicates through the mail after World War II. He continued buying large collections, picking the best stamps out for his collection, and selling the rest. Here’s how Mr. Blanding described his collection in the article:
“My collection included issues only to 1975…The final collection included 98 percent of all major world stamps listed up to 1975 in the Scott Catalogues — more than 200,000 different stamps, all in mint or unused condition except for some high-priced nineteenth-century issues. It filled to near completion fifty bulging volumes of the Scott International series. It included the best copies from all the collections I had purchased over the years, so the stamp condition was usually exceptional on all but some of the early values. “
By 1995, approaching age 80 and not having the space for his large collection in the retirement home he was moving into, he decided to sell all his stamps. Incredibly, Mr. Blanding went on to live another 17 years after selling his collection, passing away in 2014 at the age of 97.
He never did say how much he sold the collection for, but he gave a clue at the end of the article by his statement, “…my five grandchildren obtained their university or other needed graduate education costs from that collection. It continues to contribute to our family today.”
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re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
Nice story.
In a much more modest way I try to do the same: sell duplicates in order to buy (small) accumulations from which I take the stamps I can use for my own collection and then sell the remainder again. Or I buy from the approvals the ones I can use with the money I made selling. Bottom line is that it is a closed circuit: I need not invest any money, I only use the earnings from selling to buy new stuff. That way I do not get into an argument with my wife either :-)
What I do not do is collect worldwide. That would be far too time consuming and apart from that: I do not like stamps from Austria, Eastern Europe, Asia etc. (just to name a few). I must admit though that once in a while a new collecting area is started.
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re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
i think time consuming is the key word,imagine collecting the whole world and selling stamps on the side to pay the tab ! I supplement my stamp purchases by selling stamps here and covers on ebay..looking back to 1987 i may have had one year where i sold more than i purchased.
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09:15:23am
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
"i think time consuming is the key word..."
That's what immediately jumped out at me. The process of planning, finding, researching, procuring, negotiating, driving to and from the post office, not to mention working with the reference books and then the albums themselves. And on top of it, these weren't willy-nilly pick up the phone, "send them to me" type purchases. If he was able to buy, sell and acquire within the margins, that takes planning and effort.
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
"i think time consuming is the key word"
I agree! Plus, I believe he worked his regular full-time job too! But, of course, this was over a 50-year time period too.
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BuckaCover.com - 80,000 covers priced 60c to $1.50 - Easy browsing 500 categories
16 Feb 2017
12:05:34pm
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
Basically, you are describing a hobby that was run as a business, with all profits earned as a result of all that labour reinvested in inventory.
Even a modest $10,000 per year profit from the buying and selling could build a $500,000 collection over 50 years - plus the significant appreciation that occurred over the years into the 1980s.
Roy
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re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
So running the hobby as a business could or could not take some pleasure out of the hobby side. Theres no way i could do the business side..it would frazzle me...but he must have had a system and the focus to do it.
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
I used to have a posting board tag line:
eBay is like cocaine. At first it seems harmless but before you know it you are dealing to support your habit.
seems appropriate here!
eBay did get me back to stamp collecting in the good ole days. When eBay first started I decided to sell duplicates from my car dealer brochure collection. Back then you could do no wrong. Everything sold. Everything got multiple bids. Before long I was grossing $1000 a month.
Then I discovered the stamp category! Flush with my profits I found Scott 300B the booklet pane of my Franklin stamp! I had never seen one in person. I sniped it with a few seconds to go manually (there were no tools then) and I was ecstatic! Done, over with! I was hooked.
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re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
I remember ! 1998 i did not have a scanner but everything i described on ebay sold ! I wish i could say the same today...i think the field is saturated !
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
Exactly Phil! In those days I'd list car brochures from the 1970s and 1980s starting at $3.99 plus $2.99 postage. Everything sold and my average sale was $12.00. Over time, r
This market got saturated by clueless sellers listing them for a dollar with free postage. Nevermind that you couldn't mail it for a dollar! Soon it wasn't worthwhile to sell.
But when it was good it was great. It finances scanner, my first Sony Magical $700 digital camera, as well as the expensive stamps in my Franklin collection!
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likes this post.
Login to Like.
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
Chris, As I think you know this is the same approach I've used in building my collection.
Unless one is rich I think it is the best and most logical way to build a large WW collection. I like to emphasize that I am not even close to being rich and that a very respectable World wide collection can be put together by most anyone with a logical mind and lots of time on their hands.
I do disagree with his estimation of 200,000 stamps through 1975, I believe it to be way off the mark and should be closer to 400,000.
Thanks for your order of those Guatemalan stamps you ordered today, they'll be off to you tomorrow and I will use the money toward some other stamp(s) I need.
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Login to Like.
06:37:33am
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
You can add me to the same boat that Antonio and the others are in. Buying box lots and collections, taking out what was needed and selling the remainder to use the money to buy more of the same a little over the past 40 years, not counting when I sold stamps to kids in the neighborhood when I was also a kid, is the manner in which I built my world wide collection.
I tend to no longer buy the box lots that are jumbles of unsorted common stuff. I just don't need that much of it, and the common stuff is hard to sell. I prefer to buy MNH country collections, or mixed country lots of MNH sets. The last couple of years I have been pouncing on many complete MNH definitive sets that seem to be coming onto the market more frequently than in the past. Maybe I just hadn't been paying much attention to those offerings. Still, it's nice to find them, because usually one gets a nice to look at, full album page or two out of those definitive sets. Plus while I usually already have several of the stamps in those sets, I get to sell them off to help pay a little for the complete sets while others get to fill in some spaces in their own albums.
What a vicious cycle this hobby is! Stamps keep revolving around from one collector to the next. It's like a feeding frenzy with sharks going after the chum!
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
"Thanks for your order of those Guatemalan stamps you ordered today, they'll be off to you tomorrow and I will use the money toward some other stamp(s) I need."
Great! I feel like a part-owner in your collection
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
I did some digging through my club's back issues looking for the original article. FYI, it's in the November 2009 issue, not February. Page 1044, as Chris cited.
I enjoyed the discussion here. May try selling some of my big box of duplicates soon.
Mark
Login to Like
this post
re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
Yes, sorry I got the month wrong. It was corrected on another site, but forgot to correct it here.
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re: HOW TO BUILD A (ALMOST) COMPLETE WORLDWIDE COLLECTION AT NO COST
""I do disagree with his estimation of 200,000 stamps through 1975, I believe it to be way off the mark and should be closer to 400,000"
"
There is a massive difference between the two sets of numbers.
Using data on Colnect I estimated 200,000 stamps through 1970, stamps 1971 through 1975 would not make up the balance of 200,00 in fact nowhere near it. I acknowledge that this number has grown since I last conducted my analysis which points to the Colnect database being in constant flux.
So which figures are we to take as being more accurate?
I find these fascinating discussions especially as a WW collector measuring % completion is something I periodically calculate and graph.
Maybe those using Scott databases would be able to provide some further estimates and advise the strengths and weaknesses of those estimates.
Regards
Richmond
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this post