I recently bought one of the most remarkable collections (accumulations to be more precise) that I’ve ever seen. To keep the story short, I’m going to omit a few incidental details.

Sam (not his real name) called me on a Tuesday evening. His father-in-law was a stamp collector. Sam and his wife wanted to dispose of the collection. No one in the family was interested in it. Sam said that there were, “a lot of stamps.” I hear this all of the time from people who call me. Most times, this means a few thousand stamps in an album or two and maybe a box or two of duplicates.

However, Sam explained that it took three trips with his large pickup truck to move the stamps from the father-in-laws house to his house. OK, three trips is a lot. Now I’m curious. How many stamps are there and how much of it is “dead weight” of empty stock books, etc.?

I arranged to meet Sam in Ohio. When I got there, he showed me the stamps. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “a lot”.

There were over 100 boxes of various sizes all containing used US stamps. Most were on paper. A few were off paper and somewhat sorted.

It turns out that the father-in-law was a part time dealer in used stamps. He was buying kiloware and then soaking and sorting it. For the time involved and these are mostly low value stamps, I wonder how much money he made at it? Probably not a lot.

Anyway, I agreed to purchase the accumulation. The total weight was just over 2000 pounds. I’m not exaggerating. About 90% of the accumulation was on paper, common US stamps.

If someone ever asks me, I can now truthfully tell them that I own a ton of stamps. Not figuratively, but literally!

My wife, Lori, wondered where I was going to put all those boxes of stamps at. I suggested that the weather was nice now that it was summer and her car could sit in the driveway while the stamps occupied the garage for a short period of time until I could get them sold. That didn’t go over very well with her. By the way, my car sat in the driveway. My half of the garage was full of boxes of stamps for a few weeks. Lori’s car was inside the garage the whole time, of course!

Based on what’s on paper, what’s off of paper and so forth, there must be about 10 million stamps. I wish you could see this stuff. Words don’t do it justice. If you actually saw the boxes of stamps, you would be amazed.