Over-Abundand Blessings!

I've picked up a dozen or so lots from my good friend Shayne Clinard's Web-Collector eBay auctions over the last two weeks. Some of them were great, some were 'adequate'- I got enough stamps out of them I could use to make the purchase price reasonable.

I also like to trade stamps. I try to keep up to ten or twelve copies each of all duplicate stamps I get. I keep them sorted down by using the old material I started with when I tried to make a living as a stamp dealer (and failed...). I've run across an uncomfortable phenomena this past week, one I'm having a hard time dealing with. I not only have gotten enough stamps for my collection and my trade stock, but literally HUNDREDS of extra copies.

One of the things I try to do is to also "recycle" material I buy within the local community. Shayne helps with this by offering an in-store table where we can sell our lots. He takes a 10% transaction fee, which is quite reasonable. However, few people other than me are nutty enough to want, or even accept a hundred or more copies of the same stamp. I've bundled up tens of thousands of stamps on several occasions, and sent them to Beverly Fox at Weeda Stamps, for her online weekly bidboard. The quantity of duplicates I've gotten recently is even too much for that. I've tried to always bundle ten or more collectable copies of each stamp, and offer from 300 to 1000 different in the lot. I try to keep the exact number of each stamp at 50 or below. With what I've gotten in the past two weeks, I have as many as 400 copies of a single stamp - far too many to recycle, either through Weeda or Shayne's shop.

If anyone's looking for a wholesale accumulation of stamps from Australia, Australian Antarctic Territory, and Finland, get in touch with me. I've got at least 50 stamps in the 50-to-400-copy range, and more to sort!