The anatomy of fun
For the last 4 weeks me and my wife have been somewhat occupied with sorting a 1kg box of worldwide off-paper stamps. It’s been a lot of fun, so I thought to share some details about it.
First, to put the box contents into some kind of perspective… One kilo of off-paper stamps equals around 10-15,000 stamps, possibly a lot more if most stamps are small. It’s simply a HUGE number of stamps…For the box I paid 20€ (30USD), and 9€ (14USD) for the postage from Germany to Finland. Usually off-paper box lots like this pay at least twice as much, but as the seller had removed valuable items, it had a bargain price.
Contents of the "have box" (see chapters below). Very likely most of these I will pass on either as trades material, donations etc.
After receiving the lot, I (and my wife) started to divide the lot into four boxes:
The first box holds on-paper items as well as stamps that need soaking.
The second box holds mint items – as there are something we don’t collect, putting them straight into separate space makes the rotation (=selling, exchange etc) a whole lot easier.
And finally there are the have and have-not boxes. The first box contains items we very likely have in our collection, the other box contains new arrivals. Classification is based purely on visual memory, so it’s not 100% reliable. But it’s a fun way to spend cold autumn/winter evenings together and enjoy new findings. And above all, it gives a good summary whether the buyout was good or not.
Contents of have-not box. Most of these will find a new home at our collections.
This process took roughly nearly 3 weeks to compensate. The output was pretty average (despite low price and expectations): about half of the stamps ended up in have box while about one fourth was new items.
This is just one way to look the contents of a box lot
For the past few late nights I’ve been sorting the content of have-not box to smaller, country specific piles. As the lot came from Germany, a large part of the content is from central-European countries. But like most box lots, there is a plethora of randomly seen stamp nations – like Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan etc - with just few stamps.Very likely this box provides somewhere around 1-2,000 new stamps to our collections.
As a rough estimate I’d say that about 20% of the stamps in the box are damaged (folds,tears,thins etc), and they will move on towards the junk bin. This is suprisingly little, but a lot might be explained by the fact that the box contains material mainly from the 1970’s onwards.
Was it worth it? Well, I can say that 20 euros + postage is not a bad price for fun that lasts for months.
Loved this post. It brought back so many great memories from younger days. I still think of myself as a stamp collector even though I haven’t really looked at my collection in years. But I still have it and I still tear off stamps from envelopes when I run across them and put them in a big envelope.
But yes, hours of enjoyment can be gotten from sorting stamps and organizing ones collection–you are so right. Someday I’ll have to delve back into mine.
Lee
Sounds very fun indeed. Thanks for publishing your numbers and percentages, they really help with a study that I have been trying to perform recently.
I have been crunching some numbers in order to determine the best way to accomplish my goal of all world collecting. Like any ambitious goal, I need a good plan based on realities. Using some simple probability theory and a spreadsheet I have realized how daunting the task is and how much more intriguing it has become.
The idea is simple. Assume your goal is to collect all the world’s stamps (Total of 500,000 for this example). Assume you sort through appoximately the same number of stamps per year (from your favorite source, kiloware, old collections, etc.) and that among those, you find 20,000 different and undamaged per year. The probability of finding “have-not” stamps within those 20,000 different decreases as your collection grows like,
probability of need = 1 – #have/Total
The first year you keep 20,000, the second year you keep 19,200, the third year 18,432, etc.
Of course, this can only be applied to the “common” stamps, the ones that you might expect to show up in kiloware and the assumption is made that every “common” stamp is just as “common” as another. A very simple model so far, but let’s see what the numbers say.
It would take between 3-4 years to reach 10% completion, 18yrs to reach 50%, 75yrs to reach 95%, and nearly 400yrs to completion. Interesting, but hardly reality.
With your numbers above and from your previous article about the feasibility of collecting all world all era, I have come up with a missing piece. I considered a correction factor, a number to scale the duplication probability to account for some “common” stamps being more scarce than another due to supply and demand (think topical collectors and postal use). Since this relationship between stamps is mostly constant over time, the correction acts as a linear scale factor. I tried a couple of different numbers based on your “average” results from your kiloware and inferred from your other post about your completion %. (Contact me if you want the nitty gritty details).
First I tried a factor of 2.0, the odds of finding duplicates is doubled. This drastically changes the results, 10% completion still takes 3-4 years, but 50% takes over 100 years! A scale factor of 4, perhaps more realistic, increases the 50% level to … actually, I ran out of space on the spreadsheet. Clearly this correction factor has a large effect and fine tuning with more data should be necessary.
I guess the point is that eventually, buying large lots of stamps has diminishing returns, and that happens quicker than I expected. So, either I have to increase the number of large lots I buy each year to account for the increased number of duplicates or buy more specific lots and increase the trading. My dreams of making it to 90% on a shoe string budget and then buying the rest individually are probably just dreams, but I will have a lot of fun trying.
David
Thanks Lee,
It’s great to hear to the post brought back good memories. That’s what (stamp) collecting is made of
Hi David,
Having fun while trying to build as complete ww collection as possible is the best part. Definitely.
And I certainly try not to take things too seriously either
As for working low budget solution, I think you it’s a combination of lots of things. In the beginning, large bulk lots like this work. But sooner or later, there is no other choise than to buy more specific lots and increase the trading. For example I’m in a situation where I have approx. every fourth European postage stamp in the collection, but only 5/100 stamps from elsewhere.
The geek inside me loves the math part. I will be definitely sending you email.
Hi Keijo,
I’m enjoying reading your blog. I’m new in stamp collecting. I only have about 50 stamps and they are all used. I’m just wondering that if ever you will just put some of your unwanted stamps in the trash bin I would glady welcome them to help my small collection. I’m willing to pay for the postage.
Keep on writing about interesting articles about stamps. Looking forward on your next.
Best regards
Hi Aries,
Any “unwanted stamp” donations I give, go directly to local charity organizations or kids/youth at my local area. That is the most convenient way for me, as I have no means to check if everyone asking for “free stamps” is what they claim to be. I hope you understand my policy.
best,
-keijo-
Hi Keijo,
Thanks for the reply.
Best regards
“Classification is based purely on visual memory”
Really amazing….
I just happen to have a good visual memory (but unfortunately it’s not eidetic). And if it’s of any comfort, my memory is absolutely hopeless with dates (like birthdays, anniversaries etc).
I remember reading somewhere that a person’s memory is at it’s peak in the age of 30-35. So in few years time I’ll be going merrily downhill… LOL