Without reading this entire thread-i apologize if this has already been mentioned. The proliferation of issues for every little thing does not help. Simply put-- too many issues. We have stamps for mickey mouse and comic book covers,flowers,flags,olympics and every possible topic. Who can keep up with them all? After you have built a collection for years and years you may wind up selling it for less than face value. Not much encougement there. i collected used world stamps as a child because of the huge variety avialable and they were very inexpensive and you could spend hours checking thousands of stamps for a few dollars. But if you went to sell them they were almost worthless. Not so with coins. Even a beat up silver quarter saved from 1964 is worth about $3.00 today, while a mint 6 cent stamp is worth maybe, well,- 6 cents. You can get neat coins in bank rolls or even change with the possibility of being worth much more than face value. Stamps? Why bother?
I inherited two big boxes of stamps from my grandmother. I have no clue if they are worth anything. Anyone in the bay area with expertise who wants to help me figure it out?
So six years later, weiss inspired me to TTT. I still like both stamps AND coins AND still realize that the meager levels I can afford to play at, will insure that my collections will always be considered "meager." So be it.
In my limited experience, I'm seeing a stronger market than during the depths of the recession a few years ago... Overall though, my feeling is that it's an increasingly smaller and aging audience for the material, and over time, I don't invision any great growth in the hobby. And, in fact seeing it retracting given the aging demographics of the population and overall reduced exposure to Postage by the younger of the population... Mail and postage are relics of the past.... The world has gotten 'smaller'.... Far away and distant lands have for the most part, lost their mystique.... When kids can connect to distant parts of the globe with the click of the finger, some little piece of ink on some paper might lose its magic to light the imagination.... Just my two cents.... I might be wrong..... Afterall, I've been told there's still a strong market in marbles! And, almost EVERYONE old enough to remember actually playing marbles is long passed along.....
Happy, humble, honored and proud recipient of the “You Suck” award 10/22/2014
The upside down plane 24 cents stamp posted a few posts up was used for a promotion by the post office. It was reprinted last year with the upright plane on the stamp being the rare one. I think USPS printed about 100. I think when the USPS created the self adhesives it put the final nail in the coffin for the hobby. I collected stamps throughout my teens.
Wow. I saw this thread and thought, "Oh, hasn't this one been done before?" Then, I looked at the poster and saw that I posted it! Totally forgot about this one!
<< <i>The upside down plane 24 cents stamp posted a few posts up was used for a promotion by the post office. It was reprinted last year with the upright plane on the stamp being the rare one. I think USPS printed about 100. I think when the USPS created the self adhesives it put the final nail in the coffin for the hobby. I collected stamps throughout my teens.
Interesting that this 2007 thread would resurface today. I just came back from the post office where I saw they were promoting the sale of inverted airplane stamps identical to the valuable ones but differing only with the amount reading 24 rather than 2. (Apparently so you can put two together for mailing at the now 48 cent rate for a first class letter.)
1856 stamp, the only one of its kind known to exist, will be most valuable object by weight and size ever sold, says Sotheby's
The British Guiana one-cent magenta stamp. Photograph: Reuters A one-cent magenta postage stamp printed in what was then British Guiana in 1856 is expected to fetch a record price of $10m-$20m (£6m-£12m), Sotheby's has said.
The stamp is being sold by the estate of John du Pont, a chemical company heir who died aged 72 in 2010 in a Pennsylvania prison where he was serving a sentence for the 1996 shooting of an Olympic champion US wrestler, David Schultz.
Du Pont, whose wealth was estimated at $250m at the time of his 1997 trial, was one of the richest murder defendants in US history.
Sotheby's said experts from the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) had re-authenticated the stamp, the only one of its kind known to exist, and it would be offered at auction in New York on 17 June.
"It is one inch by one and a quarter inches, it's tiny and when it sells it will be the most valuable object by weight and size ever sold," said David Redden, Sotheby's vice-chairman and director of special projects.
"Our estimate on this stamp is $10m to $20m. That seems like an awful lot, but in the great scheme of things, across the entire collecting world, the most extraordinary objects in every field, that price suddenly becomes a little modest."
Chris Harman, chairman of the RPSL's expert committee, said the stamp printed in what is now Guyana was without peer.
"It's one of the first stamps in the world, 1856, British Guiana was one of the first countries in the world to issue their stamps, and this was a locally printed stamp, of which there are very few four-cent, and there's only one one-cent, so it has gained this iconic status," he said.
It has not been on public view since 1986, when it was exhibited at a stamp show in Chicago. The last time it was certified as authentic by the RPSL was in 1935, since when several attempts at forging it have been made.
The current auction record for a single stamp was set by the Treskilling Yellow in 1996 at 2.8m Swiss francs (then worth about $2.2m).
The one-cent magenta was printed in British Guiana in 1856 after a shipment of stamps from England was delayed, which threatened to disrupt postal services throughout the colony.
The postmaster turned to the printers of the local Royal Gazette newspaper and commissioned a contingency supply – the one-cent magenta, a four-cent magenta, and a four-cent blue.
The sole surviving example of the one-cent was first rediscovered not far from where it was initially purchased. In 1873, L Vernon Vaughan, a 12-year-old Scottish schoolboy living with his family in British Guiana, found the stamp among a group of family papers bearing many British Guiana issues.
A budding stamp collector, Vaughan added it to his album and later sold the stamp to another collector in British Guiana. It entered Britain in 1878, and shortly after that it was purchased by Count Philippe la Renotiere von Ferrary, one of the greatest stamp collectors in history.
France seized his collection, which had been donated to the Postmuseum in Berlin, as part of the war reparations due from Germany, and sold the stamp in 1922. It changed hands several more times before Du Pont, an avid philatelist, paid $935,000 for the stamp at auction in 1980
I collected stamps for about a week when I was maybe 10 years old. Then I got over it. ....Stamps are made to be used for one and only one thing. That's it. And once they're used, they're literally garbage. They are the toothpick, the twist-tie, the tampon of the collecting world.
Some of those old stamps,even used,will fetch a handsome sum.
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong. I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein- quoted in Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” For Einstein, honesty was fundamental. Attention to truth in small things reflected a person’s integrity on a larger scale.
I am (for now at least) semi-retired after my layoff last year but I'm now working half-time in our tiny little town's small post office. (It no longer even has a postmaster itself; its postmaster is in another office. Apart from the carrier, I'm it.) It got me thinking about my roots in stamp collecting and got me to crack open my old stamp album again; when I was a kid I collected stamps as avidly as coins. And while my coin bug mostly stayed intact (even though I lack the finances to feed it these days), my interest in stamps came and went. I have to agree with the person who said that the self-adhesive stamps have hurt collecting. It's hard to get one stamp off of a pane of 20, let alone "coils" from a roll, when you can't easily tear along perforations for most issues. It also makes it difficult to collect an issue without having to buy an entire pane of 12, or 16, or 20. (Maybe that's the idea, but it can be a turn-off.) It was much easier as it was when I was a kid when we could have the postal clerk or the nice lady at the local drug store (where they also sold stamps) tear off one of each new issue for me.
At this point I think stamp collecting is still fun. But it's very unlikely to be financially rewarding years from now, which makes it harder to plunk down (say) a grand on a stamp as opposed to a quality rare coin.
There was always the assumption as last resort they were always useable at face value for postage. So now no one sends letters and there's not even enough room to plaster enough old unused 3 or 4 cent commems on it anyway.
My grandmother saved sheets of 3¢ stamps from the 1940's and 1950's.
I discovered that they were only worth face value or less. (She did better with the silver coins she also saved).
I sold some of the sheets on Ebay in 2010, and the only one that sold for more than face value was a sheet of 70 3¢ 1948 Fort Bliss Centennial stamps, which went for $12.00.
The Fort Bliss stamps probably sold for more than face value because they had a German V-2 rocket on them.
<< <i>I have never collected stamps, but I always liked these three ...
>>
I like these three too, but every one of them has been reissued by the USPS with slight modifications. Makes it somewhat less urgent to acquire the originals. It's fun to use the reissues for postage occasionally.
I'd like to have a set of the 1930 Graf Zepplins, and if I wait long enough they'll probably reissue those too.
Of these three stamps shown, the 4¢ Columbian need not cost much at all (unless you demand perfect centering, as-new condition and perfect, original gum.) The $1 Trans-Miss is much more (but reasonably doable if a space-filler, or stamp with slight condition issues doesn't bother you) -- and the Upside-Down Flying Jenny would require just a bit more in resources than that.
I have over 500 first day covers from the 1930's through the 1960's...I might used them to light the fire in the fireplace next year. >>
Stamp collecting can be both fun and educational. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot after I bought a lot of 5,000 used world-wide stamps from one of the sellers for $5 or $6. This was a worthwhile and very inexpensive way to learn about many countries and currencies. I spent a lot of time filling world stamp albums, trying to find all the matching stamps. So what, if they were worthless stamps? The fun and educational factors far out weighted the financial cost. As a ten or twelve year old kid this kept me busy for many hours. I never graduated to the higher cost stamps realm. There were too many varieties, intricacies, and seemingly pointless little variances to make it worthwhile to try to learn. Learning stamps seemed (and is) a lot more difficult to learn then learning coins. Stamps are also a lot more difficult to take care of and organize. (At least for me, i.e.). You have to be very careful when handling stamps, you can't let them get wet or get the slightest crease or tear. All this proved way to difficult for me. Thus I gave them up and went with coins. Still, I think that every kid should go through the same experience that I did. That is, buy a big pile of used world stamps (if they are still available cheap), and put then in an album. This would be for fun and educational purposes only, with no financial expectations. It is well worth the cost and effort. JMHO.
Never collected stamps per se, but from time to time I weaken and pick up a few here/there. As a collector,not an investor,you can't beat the price. One cannot help but appreciate their artistic merit both in design and color, and the historical value of the various events depicted on them. From the Zeps, space race,Americana,US scenery,planes(my favorite). Possibly from a learning standpoint of Americana their depictions may teach more historically than coinage. Current coins now rely heavily on Presidential figures. Yes stamps have their fair share of them as well, but I feel stamps depict more variety such as holidays,auto racing, movies,animals, sports,wars, medical advances, etc. Stamps had the misfortune to be "minted" on paper, a much less valued commodity than coins, what with their gold/silver/copper content. I wonder if coin designs would of sold so well/been appreciated if relegated to being "minted" on something other than an expensive metal. Wonder what some stamp designs would of looked like on some current used coinage, replacing the current Presidents/Liberty themed line up. Just my own views, by no means a scientific one.
Successful transactions:Tookybandit. "Everyone is equal, some are more equal than others".
The supply/demand thing working as usual. Some time back I toyed with the idea of a CSA stamp collection, but realized there's little challenge to it. Pretty well could be done with PayPal and eBay in one sitting
Comments
The proliferation of issues for every little thing does not help. Simply put-- too many issues. We have stamps for mickey mouse and comic book covers,flowers,flags,olympics and every possible topic. Who can keep up with them all? After you have built a collection for years and years you may wind up selling it for less than face value. Not much encougement there. i collected used world stamps as a child because of the huge variety avialable and they were very inexpensive and you could spend hours checking thousands of stamps for a few dollars. But if you went to sell them they were almost worthless. Not so with coins. Even a beat up silver quarter saved from 1964 is worth about $3.00 today, while a mint 6 cent stamp is worth maybe, well,- 6 cents.
You can get neat coins in bank rolls or even change with the possibility of being worth much more than face value. Stamps? Why bother?
Overall though, my feeling is that it's an increasingly smaller and aging audience for the material, and over time, I don't invision any great growth in the hobby. And, in fact seeing it retracting given the aging demographics of the population and overall reduced exposure to Postage by the younger of the population... Mail and postage are relics of the past....
The world has gotten 'smaller'....
Far away and distant lands have for the most part, lost their mystique....
When kids can connect to distant parts of the globe with the click of the finger, some little piece of ink on some paper might lose its magic to light the imagination....
Just my two cents....
I might be wrong.....
Afterall, I've been told there's still a strong market in marbles! And, almost EVERYONE old enough to remember actually playing marbles is long passed along.....
Happy, humble, honored and proud recipient of the “You Suck” award 10/22/2014
Inverted Jenny
Box of 20
broke really fast.
2 Clubs including this one
Coin Club Benefit auctions ..... View the Lots
<< <i>The upside down plane 24 cents stamp posted a few posts up was used for a promotion by the post office. It was reprinted last year with the upright plane on the stamp being the rare one. I think USPS printed about 100. I think when the USPS created the self adhesives it put the final nail in the coffin for the hobby. I collected stamps throughout my teens.
Inverted Jenny >>
Interesting that this 2007 thread would resurface today. I just came back from the post office where I saw they were promoting the sale of inverted airplane stamps identical to the valuable ones but differing only with the amount reading 24 rather than 2. (Apparently so you can put two together for mailing at the now 48 cent rate for a first class letter.)
The British Guiana one-cent magenta stamp. Photograph: Reuters
A one-cent magenta postage stamp printed in what was then British Guiana in 1856 is expected to fetch a record price of $10m-$20m (£6m-£12m), Sotheby's has said.
The stamp is being sold by the estate of John du Pont, a chemical company heir who died aged 72 in 2010 in a Pennsylvania prison where he was serving a sentence for the 1996 shooting of an Olympic champion US wrestler, David Schultz.
Du Pont, whose wealth was estimated at $250m at the time of his 1997 trial, was one of the richest murder defendants in US history.
Sotheby's said experts from the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) had re-authenticated the stamp, the only one of its kind known to exist, and it would be offered at auction in New York on 17 June.
"It is one inch by one and a quarter inches, it's tiny and when it sells it will be the most valuable object by weight and size ever sold," said David Redden, Sotheby's vice-chairman and director of special projects.
"Our estimate on this stamp is $10m to $20m. That seems like an awful lot, but in the great scheme of things, across the entire collecting world, the most extraordinary objects in every field, that price suddenly becomes a little modest."
Chris Harman, chairman of the RPSL's expert committee, said the stamp printed in what is now Guyana was without peer.
"It's one of the first stamps in the world, 1856, British Guiana was one of the first countries in the world to issue their stamps, and this was a locally printed stamp, of which there are very few four-cent, and there's only one one-cent, so it has gained this iconic status," he said.
It has not been on public view since 1986, when it was exhibited at a stamp show in Chicago. The last time it was certified as authentic by the RPSL was in 1935, since when several attempts at forging it have been made.
The current auction record for a single stamp was set by the Treskilling Yellow in 1996 at 2.8m Swiss francs (then worth about $2.2m).
The one-cent magenta was printed in British Guiana in 1856 after a shipment of stamps from England was delayed, which threatened to disrupt postal services throughout the colony.
The postmaster turned to the printers of the local Royal Gazette newspaper and commissioned a contingency supply – the one-cent magenta, a four-cent magenta, and a four-cent blue.
The sole surviving example of the one-cent was first rediscovered not far from where it was initially purchased. In 1873, L Vernon Vaughan, a 12-year-old Scottish schoolboy living with his family in British Guiana, found the stamp among a group of family papers bearing many British Guiana issues.
A budding stamp collector, Vaughan added it to his album and later sold the stamp to another collector in British Guiana. It entered Britain in 1878, and shortly after that it was purchased by Count Philippe la Renotiere von Ferrary, one of the greatest stamp collectors in history.
France seized his collection, which had been donated to the Postmuseum in Berlin, as part of the war reparations due from Germany, and sold the stamp in 1922. It changed hands several more times before Du Pont, an avid philatelist, paid $935,000 for the stamp at auction in 1980
Some of those old stamps,even used,will fetch a handsome sum.
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong. I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein- quoted in Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” For Einstein, honesty was fundamental. Attention to truth in small things reflected a person’s integrity on a larger scale.
My Coin Blog
My Toned Lincoln Registry Set
<< <i>Here's a great story about a lost stamp of great value. >>
This was an interesting story. Does anybody know how it turned out, and who ended up with the stamp?
EDIT: Nevermind, I found the answer.
money being talked about.
Probably a better idea to pick up a nice painting.
At this point I think stamp collecting is still fun. But it's very unlikely to be financially rewarding years from now, which makes it harder to plunk down (say) a grand on a stamp as opposed to a quality rare coin.
<< <i>What ever happened to stamp collecting? >>
i have a few unused duck stamps and a few gum-intact numismatic stamps
it is a bear of a job to look up a shoebox full of stamps if you don't have a strong level of comfort for them.
.
I discovered that they were only worth face value or less. (She did better with the silver coins she also saved).
I sold some of the sheets on Ebay in 2010, and the only one that sold for more than face value was a sheet of 70 3¢ 1948 Fort Bliss Centennial stamps, which went for $12.00.
The Fort Bliss stamps probably sold for more than face value because they had a German V-2 rocket on them.
I did keep another sheet of Fort Bliss stamps.
The Mysterious Egyptian Magic Coin
Coins in Movies
Coins on Television
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
<< <i>I have never collected stamps, but I always liked these three ...
I like these three too, but every one of them has been reissued by the USPS with slight modifications. Makes it somewhat less urgent to acquire the originals. It's fun to use the reissues for postage occasionally.
I'd like to have a set of the 1930 Graf Zepplins, and if I wait long enough they'll probably reissue those too.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
I wonder whether it's a good time to buy some of the classics @ the current low prices or whether the downward prices will continue.
It's on it's last lick.
I have over 500 first day covers from the 1930's through the 1960's...I might used them to light the fire in the fireplace next year.
"Keep your malarkey filter in good operating order" -Walter Breen
<< <i>What ever happened to stamp collecting?
It's on it's last lick.
I have over 500 first day covers from the 1930's through the 1960's...I might used them to light the fire in the fireplace next year. >>
Stamp collecting can be both fun and educational. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot after I bought a lot of 5,000 used world-wide stamps from one of the sellers for $5 or $6. This was a worthwhile and very inexpensive way to learn about many countries and currencies. I spent a lot of time filling world stamp albums, trying to find all the matching stamps. So what, if they were worthless stamps? The fun and educational factors far out weighted the financial cost. As a ten or twelve year old kid this kept me busy for many hours. I never graduated to the higher cost stamps realm. There were too many varieties, intricacies, and seemingly pointless little variances to make it worthwhile to try to learn. Learning stamps seemed (and is) a lot more difficult to learn then learning coins. Stamps are also a lot more difficult to take care of and organize. (At least for me, i.e.). You have to be very careful when handling stamps, you can't let them get wet or get the slightest crease or tear. All this proved way to difficult for me. Thus I gave them up and went with coins. Still, I think that every kid should go through the same experience that I did. That is, buy a big pile of used world stamps (if they are still available cheap), and put then in an album. This would be for fun and educational purposes only, with no financial expectations. It is well worth the cost and effort. JMHO.
Bob
An educational classic piece with the same denomination:
My Coin Blog
My Toned Lincoln Registry Set