Help needed from a philatalist

[Yorkshire Sam]

Helped an aged in law clear her loft as she is looking to move into a retirement home. Her husband died over 30 years ago and he used it for storage. Most of the stuff was junk except for a couple of items of furniture and a stamp collection of several item, and a few other bits which went for auction for her. Among the stamps was a big bag (about 3 ft by 2 ft) half full of used predecimal British definitive stamps, most QEII but a few a little earlier ... saw a couple of Kings in there. Most were still on bits of envelopes but a few were off paper. The auction house was not interested. Do these have any value to anyone? Had a look on ebay and they sell batches of similar stuff but in 100 gram packets or similar. This bag weighs nearly 2 1/2kg! Can anyone tell me if it would be of any use to collectors or should I just bin them. I dont have the time (or inclination) to batch up into 100 gram packets or sort them even if I had the knowledge to do so. Help would be appreciated

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Give them to a charity that uses them.

 

[RogerP]

Auction the whole lot in one go on eBay as unsorted "found in loft". You may be pleasantly surprised

 

[bugbear]

Auctioneers tend to know what they're about; if they say there's no great value, they're probably right.

But I'd put it on eBay - nothing to lose.

BugBear

 

[RobinBHM]

Maybe you could bag up a few hundred grams and ebay them. If you get some interest you could then do the rest.

 

[YorkshireMartin]

Helped an aged in law clear her loft as she is looking to move into a retirement home. Her husband died over 30 years ago and he used it for storage. Most of the stuff was junk except for a couple of items of furniture and a stamp collection of several item, and a few other bits which went for auction for her. Among the stamps was a big bag (about 3 ft by 2 ft) half full of used predecimal British definitive stamps, most QEII but a few a little earlier ... saw a couple of Kings in there. Most were still on bits of envelopes but a few were off paper. The auction house was not interested. Do these have any value to anyone? Had a look on ebay and they sell batches of similar stuff but in 100 gram packets or similar. This bag weighs nearly 2 1/2kg! Can anyone tell me if it would be of any use to collectors or should I just bin them. I dont have the time (or inclination) to batch up into 100 gram packets or sort them even if I had the knowledge to do so. Help would be appreciated

We had almost exactly the same situation with my grandfather We approached a local philately dealer and he took an hour or so to go through them in my fathers presence. In the end we walked away with a cheque of almost £1,000. So they were probably worth at least 3x that.

There was nothing rare that we know of, but just selling them by weight might not be the best choice. There were no penny blacks or other extreme rarities as far as we know. We did go through all of them to see if there was anything unusual.

At first, it's probably well worth doing it yourself because misprints, rare issues and the like, can sell for a small fortune, even franked.

PS. If this was to happen again now, keeping in mind I was 14 at the time, I'd probably approach a specialist forum and offer to go 60/40 with a stamp expert if they agreed to go through them. You just never know.

 

[misterfish]

It is difficult to get an actual value for a stamp collection - you need somebody with an in-depth knowledge of the stamps in question as well as their actual value. My late father-in-law was a keen stamp collector and built up a large collection of British and Commonwealth stamps including a large number of first day covers. Also there were masses of unsorted stamps.

I initially thought I could sort it all out and value it but it soon became clear that this would be a never ending task of identifying and valuing each item. You really need to be passionate about stamps otherwise it becomes an onerous task. Also it seems the values listed in catalogues are far higher than those actually for sale - looking at actual sale prices on Ebay gave a more realistic value.

We looked to see if we could find someone to value them but had no real success. In the end we put them in a specalist stamp auction who sorted them in to various lots with the few more valuable stamps put in their own lots. They all sold but were not the bonanza we initially thought.

It seems for most people it is the pleasure of the hobby and not the actual value of the stamps that matters. It seems that if you want to collect stamps as an investment then you need to buy specific high value items and not have a general collection.

We were happy that my father-in-law got many hours of pleasure from his stamps.

Misterfish