Stamp Collection

Don't know if anyone can help with this one but my late Father collected stamps for most of his life.

He's left my Brother and I with tens of thousands of them, nearly all catalogued into Countries.

The oldest one seems to be a Victorian penny red.

Bro & I don't know where to start when it comes to getting a fair price for the collection (unfortunately, neither of us are into stamps)

Wondering if any of you guys would have an idea. Didn't want to take them to some bloke we don't know who says, i'll give you a tenner for the lot if you know what I mean.

 

For what its worth...I used to save stamps many years ago... oh yes I did.
Still got the albums.
I would suggest you put all the foriegn stampsto one side for now and concentrate on the British.
You are going to need some time for this part.
Grab youself the newest Stanley Gibbons Great Britain catalogue from your library and start to carefully check each one.
It can be tricky job with the many variations, watermarks and the like.
It will give you idea of the price you would pay if you bought from Stanley Gibbons.
Please dont done sell of on the cheap.. you just never know.
Penny reds are still quite common as are they penny blacks and once again need some careful looking at before pinning them down.

Good luck.

 

Jack also collected stamps Ziggy, mostly British and as his father was a sailor he had many from round the world. He is quite proud of his collection and when he saw an advert in the local newspaper about fifteen years ago inviting people to take their antique, stamp collections etc to have them valued we duly went along. There were about 5 people in front of us and this valuer/dealer said in turn to each person that their items were more or less worthless and then proceeded to offer about £5 for them. He did the same with Jack's stamp collection and by this time we realised his game. He barely looked in 2 pages and offered a couple of pound for each book which we refused.

So be careful who you see Ziggy and as Capney says, worth a bit of time to check through - 'cos you never know :yess:

 

Thats what I was worried about Jjordie & Robert.

Thanks for that advice

A bit of analasis called for then

 

You never know....you may enjoy it..

 

Oh, I love the stamps, even though they are not really my cup of tea, but its a bit hard going over things like that as I remember being in the sitting room with my Dad & licking stamp hinges in the 1960s more than I remember the stamps themselves.

 

Best to call one of the larger auction houses and arrange for a value to be done
they or Stanley Gibbons Co. are the fairest options to you Ziggy.

 

Thanks good people, some good pointers there

 

Hey Ziggy my wife inherited her late Dads stamp collection and it was huge .. sounds a lot like the one you have .. the collection was around 4 massive albumns and she had to put the lot in a trolley in order to move them .. so off she went to Stanley Gibbons in London dragging this huge collection around the tube net work .. her purpose of going to Stanley Gibbons was to sell the lot and come home empty handed .. the nice gent in the shop took an hour so paging patiently through the collection and then said .. sorry but we would not intrested .. in other words they were not worth a red cent ..sad really as her Dad spent countless hundreds of hours and many many years building it up ..
any way we still have the stamps .. obviously they must have a value but you wouldent know how much really .. .. as you say its easy to sell them for a tenner but you dont want that do you .. Micky

 

take them to Gibbons .... they will go through them ... if there are any of value, they will only want to buy those

refuse, then list those on ebay .... you will get 3-4 times the price that Gibbons offer

 

Gibbons will undoubtedly look through your stamps and they'll offer you a fair price for any really rare ones - unfortunately, unless they come across something quite exceptional, they won't really be interested; by that I mean that whilst some of the individual stamps may be worth say £3, £4, £5, £10 or even £20, those aren't really the sort of amounts they're looking at or used to dealing in.

A quick 'google' shows there are 4 stamp dealers in Dorset (if a trip to Gibbons is a bit of a trek), along with several auctioneers. Why not take the time (or summer) to contact each of them in turn, see what they offer and either take the best price or, as others have suggested, think about eBay.

 

Thats an idea FM, there's no rush really.