At a recent meeting of my local how many stamps do I need club, I succumbed to the irresistible call of the shoebox full of off-paper worldwide stamps, shown in Figure 1. This happy purchase proved to me yet again that I am hopelessly compulsive about stamps.
Processing such a large lot of several thousand stamps can be time consuming, and there are a few good ways to go about it, and one really crazy way. The results are the same.
Let’s start with the crazy way, because it is the simplest to describe. You have a box of stamps. You have a stamp album or, more likely, a group of stamp albums. You also have some mounts or stamp hinges. Take the lid off the box, dip your stamp tongs in, pull out a stamp and mount or hinge it into the appropriate album space for instant gratification.
Now, what is wrong with this method? If you have thousands of stamps to go through, this is going to slow you down. Changing albums, flipping through multiple catalogs to identify tricky stamps, and having no method to separate the stamps you already have adds a lot of time to the task and will become very frustrating after a short while.
Another method is to estimate how much time you will have to work on the mixture in one sitting and pull out as many stamps as you believe you can handle. Begin sorting that smaller grouping by country of issue.
Processing such a large lot of several thousand stamps can be time consuming, and there are a few good ways to go about it, and one really crazy way. The results are the same.
Let’s start with the crazy way, because it is the simplest to describe. You have a box of stamps. You have a stamp album or, more likely, a group of stamp albums. You also have some mounts or stamp hinges. Take the lid off the box, dip your stamp tongs in, pull out a stamp and mount or hinge it into the appropriate album space for instant gratification.
Now, what is wrong with this method? If you have thousands of stamps to go through, this is going to slow you down. Changing albums, flipping through multiple catalogs to identify tricky stamps, and having no method to separate the stamps you already have adds a lot of time to the task and will become very frustrating after a short while.
Another method is to estimate how much time you will have to work on the mixture in one sitting and pull out as many stamps as you believe you can handle. Begin sorting that smaller grouping by country of issue.
You can buy stamp-sorting trays that help significantly with this task. The trays, such as the one shown in Figure 2, are shallow boxes with dividers to keep the sorted stamps from intermingling.
