I’ve been kind of bored lately and I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on stamps. A lot of them have been about kiloware, people getting big bags of used worldwide stamps and going through them and while I typically don’t collect like that,  the overwhelming majority of my collections are mint, I figured heck, I haven’t done that for years so I went and bought a couple of packets online and I’m going to go through them, breaking it down as I go.

First off, I bought two packets off of eBay from the same dealer. They were advertised as having “around 450” stamps per packet, meaning I should have received in the vicinity of 900 stamps. Pictured are the two packets that I received, so the first step is to count them out. Hold on, this is going to take a while.

Even though I got 2 bags, I’ll only look at one as I’ll assume the second is similar. The first one totaled 559 stamps, which exceeded the 450 estimate. It seemed relatively mixed with a high number of Australian and Belgian stamps, which is fine because I collect Australia. I did notice on several occasions that I’d get a bundle of identical stamps together, like they had all been stacked and then thrown into the bag. They tended to be older stamps and, at least at this point, I haven’t looked at value so we’ll have to see how it shakes out. I’m really not that concerned with value though, I might poke through a handful in the catalog to get a general idea.

So then I broke it down by country, just to see how much I got. There are a ton of definitives in this set, which is fine because lots of times, it’s hard to find those. It wasn’t advertised as no duplicates and clearly I got some, but if that’s all that you get, that’s not very useful. So here’s how it shook out:

Bag one: countries represented/number received. Duplicates in parenthesis.

Argentina 31 (5)

Australia 135 (55)

Australia – New South Wales 1

Austria 15 (3 duplicates, part of a block of 4)

Bahamas 2

Bangladesh 3

Barbados 1

Belgium 242 (89 – mostly Scott #158, 193 and 257)

Bermuda 1

Brazil 30 (6 – including a block of 4) – Came across a couple of older issues, including one from 1894.

Canada 13 (2)

Czechoslovakia 1

Cuba 2 (1)

Denmark 18 (3)

Egypt 2

France 33 (8)

Finland 3

Germany 16 (1) – Including one Third Reich stamp from 1923

Greece 3 (1)

Guinea 1

Hong Kong 1

Hungary 4

India 1

Ireland 13 (7 – almost all the same issue, Scott #354 from 1974)

Italy 2

Japan 6 (2)

Jersey 1

Kenya/Uganda/Tanzania 1

Malta 1

Mexico 2 (1)

Morocco 1

Nepal 1

Netherlands 5

New Zealand 3

Norway 8

Papua New Guinea 1

Philippines 1

Russia 2

Spain 3

Sweden

Switzerland 6 (1)

UK 18 (3 – plenty of Machins, all of my duplicates were these)

United Nations 2

That’s 43 nations which isn’t half bad, especially since a huge portion of the stamps weren’t modern issues. I’ll actually go through the Australia stamps and find out how that breaks down:

I wound up with a fair number of commemoratives ranging from 1956-2004, but the majority were definitives, along with the vast majority of duplicates. There was nothing really amazing in there, I went from the late 1930s (Sc#169) through the early 70s (Sc#457, but it was heavily weighted in the 40s and early 50s. I came up with a single airmail stamp (Sc# C5) and large portions of a couple of series, such as the 1988 “Working Together” series, as well as the long running definitive Australian animals series which ran through the 40s and 50s.

All in all, I can’t complain. For $7 plus postage, I got probably 10-12 hours of pleasure, over a full week, sorting through it and I still have one more packet to go. I’m going to wait a little bit on that because my back hurts and my eyes are getting blurry. I have only really gone through the Australian stamps in detail though.