Today was a more or less typical day. I had nine smaller collections to work on. These were stamp groups that had been sent to our office by collectors and which we had purchased. The first was a mixed quality United States group sent by a life long collector who was pruning some of the poorer quality stamps that he had bought when he was a younger collector to create funds to upgrade the quality of his stamps. The next group I worked on was some better US that the owner was selling to get some money for a vacation that he and his wife wanted to take. The third was a small group of French stampless covers that the owner didn’t know where he had gotten, but they probably came in an old auction lot that he had purchase long ago and they didn’t fit in with anything that he currently collected. Another collection was a seventeen volume expanded Harris worldwide collection with over 100,000 different stamps in it and that the owner had laboriously cataloged and inventoried to the last penny.
Apfelbaum buys nearly 1500 collections a year. Every collection is different and each collector has a style even if the countries that most collectors collect and the albums are pretty much the same. But each collector or each collector’s family sells for the same reason-they need the space and want the money and don’t have an interest in their stamps anymore. And once a collector decides to sell (and hopefully chooses to give us an opportunity to bid on their stamps) they set in motion the great recycling project that is part of the philatelic trade. Stamps go round and round from collector to collector. Arthur Radditz one of the most prominent collectors once said “Collectors are just custodians who take care of their stamps before they move on”.