Hemming and Hawing - Buy or Not?

Bid, bid, bid.

There is however a danger that when Lower Slobovia became integrated in the Republic of Greater Slobovia, the original plates were sold to a dealer in one of the former states and heavily reprinted. If the asking price is so low I would suspect much reprinted material.

I advise caution and try to hunt the material over time rather than buy a complete ready made collection. For me the pleasure is in the hunt.

I agree with vikingeck that part of the excitement for me is the hunt. Buying a complete collection already mounted in a nice album takes some of the fun away. I have bought a couple of collections like that in the past but I also bought them with the idea in mind that I'm pulling the stamps out of the albums and putting them in my own pages that I'm making myself...so the "nice albums" for me are just a nice by product that will be sold and get back some stamp money.

In fact...there's been a couple a times I bought the stamp collection just to get the album to sell for more money than what I paid for the stamps I wanted

brookbam

I am not a hunter but more a gatherer / organizer but I like quantity over those elusive stamps except in a few cases.

I think you are right about the best way to build a collection. But only if you follow through and sell the remainders! I am starting to accumulate a lot of dups and stuff I don't want but am not sure I have the time and drive to organize, label, scan, post and mail out to extract the value from the remnants.

Having the cancels verified is an essential part of this hard to find country. Many cancels are from River Boats as the Upper and Lower Slobovia had their issues not accepting mail from each other. As my McMichael Catalogue clearly states, " all cancels must be adjudicated by a judge, and all Dingolia,US Cancels are dog license stamp forgeries"

One of the most difficult parts of building an Upper Lower Slobovia collection is finding postally used copies of the stamps issued during the year of the big almost Schism. The Upper part of Lower Slobovia wanted to secede and join Lower Upper Slobovia because they had decided to waive the taxes on goat milk and, as everyone knows, Upper Lower Slobovia is famed for their “erstklassiger Ziegenkäse”, an international gourmet delight. During that time of upheaval, the stamps of Upper Lower Slobovia were overprinted with “ schneide den Käse” in protest. This created great winds of change, for a very short time.

I agree with REL1948 about the attractiveness of their sports stamps.

You probably have the set that celebrates their victory in the accordion-tossing event of the 1962 Summer Olympics in Mucopolis. But there was another set: the Lower Slobovians won the accordion-player-tossing event the next day and a 24-stamp series was printed that night to celebrate. But instead of showing tiny portraits of the accordion players who had nobly volunteered to be tossed - patriotism beyond the call - pictures of the Slobovian-harmonica players (played through a small straw tube set in the musician's nose) who headlined the halftime show were inserted into the plates. In a vile showing of poor sportsmanship, enraged fans had pelted the harmonicats into submission with Mucopolitan frozen farmer's cheese briskets, setting off the War of the Bagpipes. Understandably every stamp that the printers and their moonshine suppliers hadn't already stolen was buried in a peat bog, and even the mummified hulk they undoubtedly became has never been found.

(The King Prince of Lower Slobovia immediately banned the Slobovian harmonica. Today, only a few people know about the gatherings in the haunted forests where the handful of remaining maestros still play their melancholy tunes. I was fortunate enough to hear a field recording once, and it was heartbreakingly beautiful.)

Only a few copies survived, and the set (minus the 150-ferretpaw value, which appears completely lost) has been sold for up to $300,000,000 when it turns up in Kelleher auctions. Even some experts don't know about this set and if nobody pulled it from the collection, jump on it immediately.



I saw what you did there!