I see many collections that are all kind of typical: mint stamps for discount postage and if there is a collection in an album, the stamps are mostly just common/inexpensive ones with a few moderately priced ones thrown in.

My interest in these kinds of collections has waned in the last several years. I have bought many collections like this. I’m drowning in common and ordinary material. I am not anxious to take on more.

A gentleman called me over a year ago and brought his aunt’s collection to me. I reviewed it and it was worth a few hundred dollars. There was nothing spectacular in it.

In October, I received a message on my answering machine from this person. I tried returning the call several times and left messages on his answering machine, but he never returned my calls. I gave up calling him.

He calls again in December. Now he is anxious to sell the collection. I think he was looking for money to go Christmas shopping. Anyway, I bought other collections since then and I no longer had an interest in his aunt’s collection. I was not being mean. I just did not want to shell out money for something that will sit idle behind all of the other smaller collections that I still had to go through.

“Sorry, but I don’t have a need for it any longer,” I explained. That changed the tone of the phone call completely. He was very short with me and abruptly hung up the phone.

There is nothing wrong with turning down an offer from a dealer. If you want to entertain other offers, that is your decision. What sellers need to realize, especially if the collection they are trying to sell is very ordinary, is that dealers move on to buying other material. If you don’t get back to a dealer within a few weeks at the most, the dealer assumes you are not selling the collection or you sold it to someone else. The dealer moves on to other deals.

If you return a year later with the same material, the dealer may or may not be interested in it again. It depends. A dealers stock is in constant motion. That is how they do business and generate a profit.

If this guy had returned my calls in October, I may have bought the collection. But in the meantime, I took on even more material and I honestly had no further interest in what he had to sell. It happens.

I assume because he was calling me again that he did not receive any better offers on the collection. Or maybe he never bothered seeking other offers? For all I know, the collection may have gone into the garbage. I hate to think that. But this guy was pretty upset that I was not buying his stamps. He may have disposed of it just to be done with it.