If you watch collections for sale on eBay, certain trends become apparent. For one, the great majority of the Volume One Blue Internationals for sale are albums printed in 1947 or before. There are sometimes collections housed in the 1955 and 1965 editions, but anything later is uncommon. For the Brown Internationals, the 19th Century volume is the one you are most likely to see, followed by 1900-1920 and 1920-1929. The volumes for the 1930s are comparatively rare, especially the last one with pages into 1938.
Also rare are unused volumes from the Vintage Reproductions copies of the Brown Internationals, although you do see them on occasion. But, I believe for the first time since I've been monitoring the International series on eBay, there is a complete (?) set of the Vintage Reproductions up for auction that were actually used to house a working collection. The set is being offered as 9 separate volumes by seller nystamps with the title "Pre-1940 Stamp Collection Scott Album...." This actually is a quite informative title from this seller as usually their International albums have titles along the lines of "Old Worldwide British German Italy Stamp Collection." If I could figure out how to stuff this collection into 3 binders (the maximum I am prepared cope with), I might even bid!
UPDATE: The albums sold for $2348.79, apparently all to the same bidder (not me!).
The famous stamp collector Josiah Lilly said that there were 100,000 postage stamps he wanted for his collection and he succeeded in acquiring 77,000. My considerably easier target is 35,000 of the more common stamps from 1840-1940 contained in the Scott Blue International Album Volume 1. This blog will record my progress, provide general information about Classic era philately and hopefully encourage other "Blue" collectors.
6 comments:
Not surprising that the 1947s would be most common. A collector who had reached a level somewhat beyond beginner (indicated by purchase of a Scott International) in the late 1940s or 1950s would be in his 80s or older today. 1930s era collections, for the most part, are probably coming from estates or possibly were handed down a generation. Actual 1930s moderately advanced collectors would be 90 and older today.
Just went over there to check this one out. The Senegal to Syria volume has no Sweden and no Switzerland. While it's possible the collector had neither of these countries, it's more likely that some countries have been removed for sale separately.
NYStamps really means it when they say not to make assumptions about what is not pictured. They routinely post scans of nearly all pages with stamps and anything not pictured needs to be presumed absent--I know from experience.
The other volumes need to be checked to see if entire countries are missing.
For anyone contemplating acquiring a set of Brown pages, it would be important to know whether the stamps were removed from pages but the pages are still in the albums or whether the pages are entirely gone--most likely the latter.
[I wrote an earlier comment similar to this; am not sure if it got sent--if two arrived, use this one.]
Caveat emptor.
Henry, there also aren't any pages for the US, among others, so your caveat is well taken. Perhaps the biggest issue is that if one were seriously wanting to continue building a collection using these albums, you would need to win all of them, as they are in alphabetical order (you can only buy the Vintage Reproduction pages chronologically so it would be expensive to fill in the albums/countries you missed).
Speaking of Ebay items, I saw a nice set of Lithuania from the 1918-1940 period, and the seller describes some of the really nice ones are described stuck down.
Is there a way to safely remove stuck down stamps?
I've read a variety of suggestions for stamps completely stuck to pages, but have never tried any. The two most common seem to involve putting them in the freezer or using a product like Stamplift. I would do a search on one of the major discussion groups like StampBoards and see which solution (no pun intended) seems most appropriate for your situation.
Nystamps is auctioning on eBay another set of Vintage Reproductions in 10 volumes with stamps. You can find the first volume by looking for "nystamps Old Stamp Collection A-C Scott International Album." The auctions end February 16, 2012.
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