Stamp Collecting and a Pro-tip – Rubbing Alcohol

English: US Postage stamp, Washington, 1857 is...
English: US Postage stamp, Washington, 1857 issue, 3c, 1st officially perforated issue. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Long neglected and scattered throughout the house, this weekend I began work on something I’ve been meaning to get back to ever since the debacle with trying to sell it – my stamp collection. Looking it over, I realized what a chaotic mess it was. My goal for the foreseeable future (with one possible exception in March) is to buy nothing, but to work on sorting and cataloging what I have . I’ve resurrected my old database, which will at least serve as a good starting point, and I’ve begun sorting through the mounds of stamps I have, starting with the US issues. (That’s not my stamp in the photo, btw, though I do have an imperforated version)

Which brings me to tonight’s pro-tip. One of the things I love to do is to buy someone else’s album at a stamp shop, nicking from their abandoned collections the stamps missing in my own. Of course, this means I end up with duplicates, but there have been some real treasures too. Thanks to one careful collector, for instance, I now have most of the US issues from 1949 – 1978 mint, never hinged. Not worth a fortune, but still, impressive!

But this also means having to deal with the more common scenario – stamps that have been mounted in a cheap album. Simply pulling off the mounts can damage the stamp, but leaving them on can pose its own problems. Enter: rubbing alcohol. Gingerly applied, and assuming there is no gum we’re trying to preserve, it can be used to quickly soften the glues of the stamp mount and remove it safely without any damage. Rumor has it that it can also be used as a watermark agent (for detecting), though I’m not ready to experiment with that quite yet.

What don’t I like about sorting duplicates? The 1926-34 2c Washington, carmine in color, Scott #634. For every few hundred, there are a few that contain an interesting flaw (the Type II), but it takes a lot of them to be able to find the few that do. How do I know?

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Because I went through this stack, perforation checking them first to make sure they were the right dimensions (because the same face was used multiple times, each with a slight variation in dimensions and perforation). I hate this stamp.

Swing side again – what surprised (and delighted) me the most this weekend was that middle daughter dove in with me, spending a large chunk of time sorting and organizing a huge container of loose stamps. Socks blown off.

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