ANY PHILATELISTS ON HERE?

[Stevens]

My Mother was a lifelong stamp collector. Her collection had many first day covers, lots of mint commemorative sheets, numbered blocks of 4 and world wide stamps going way back. When she passed away a few years ago we had the collection appraised. The appraised said 600-800 dollars we expected several thousand. I know she had spent thousands on it over the years. I got back to the appraiser and asked if he would like to buy the collection, thinking he had maybe made a lowball price hoping to buy it. No he wasn't interested so it sits in the closet, maybe one of us will piece it out over the internet to try to get something for it.
The appraiser said there is almost no collector value in the numbered blocks and mint sheets to best just use them for postage, but with forever stamps who knows what the cost of postage is anymore, I know it can be found out on USPS website but it is inconvenient.
So, so much for what was a good hobby, at least it kids learned some geography and history while collecting stamps, I know I did.
Steve W

 

[chief38]

I've got a reasonable sized collection that I inherited from my Dad. I am not into stamps at all and was interested in selling them. After going to two stamp & coin shops I was told by both they would give me less than face value without even looking closely. Many of them are US plate blocks and there are also a fair amount of foreign cancelled stamps.

For many of the reasons we all know, stamp collecting has sort of fallen by the wayside and both shops told me to use them as general postage on letters and packages. I can not bring myself to do that since my Dad has collected these since he was in the Navy. I guess if I never sell them I'll just save them to look through as many of them are historical and beautiful.