This has come up before, but recently, a new thread showed up on a stamp forum, I’ll link to it below if you want to read it, wondering why stamp catalog values are so far off what the actual sale prices are. There are a lot of arguments on both sides, including from me, but there just isn’t room in a place like that to really dig into it, so I’m going to do it here.
Enjoy.
First, here’s the link, if you’re interested: https://www.stampcommunity.org/topic.asp?topic_id=86051
To start, I’m going to make the point that I made there, that catalog prices mean nothing because in any collectible market, prices are entirely between the buyer and the seller. There is no inherent value, only what someone is willing to give you for it in the moment.
This was very clear recently when James Demsey, who ran A&D Stamps, retired recently. The story is, and I haven’t verified this myself, nor have I talked to James since he retired, that he had about a $3 million inventory and it went to auction and sold for $185,000. (EDIT: I actually went and looked and it’s $85k, not $185k) Something in that range. If I’m wrong in that, let me know in the comments because it doesn’t matter, this is just an example. The stamps weren’t “worth” $3 million if there wasn’t a buyer willing to give him $3 million for them. The buyer they found was willing to give what they were willing to give, whatever that happened to be. They were worth what the buyer was willing to provide, no more. There was a disparity between what he, or someone else, since again, I don’t have the details and it doesn’t matter, valued the stamps at and what someone was willing to pay for them.
That’s how reality works. This is a real world thing, not just in the collectibles market. There are tons of examples of people who thought they were sitting on a gold mine and found, when they tried to sell, that they weren’t. You can look at comic books or Beanie Babies or anything else. Heck, Stanley Gibbons paid $8.3 million for the 1c Magenta and today, there’s no way they could recoup that money. I’m sure it’s sitting on their books at $8.3 million, but they’re not going to get that, or maybe they can find someone willing to give them $10 million, who knows. It’s worth whatever someone will give you for it, no more, no less.
The reality is that what it says in the catalogs is not what you’re going to get. You will get 10-30% catalog value for the vast majority of stamps out there. That’s really what the whole discussion was about. Why are the catalogs so wrong? Because the catalog makers are just not dealing with reality. For a relatively few high-end stamps that go to auction somewhat regularly, sure, they might be closer because they have well-publicized values that people are actually paying. That doesn’t mean that your stamp is going to sell for that much, though. It’s because your stamp, no stamp at all, has actual “value”. You can’t say “I have stamp X, therefore I deserve money Y”. It doesn’t work like that.
That’s really where I have to step in and say “you know, you’re really not doing hobbies the right way…” and get yelled at. Of course, that’s just my opinion and that means exactly that. You can have your own view, but, as far as I am concerned, as far as I have ever been concerned, my hobbies have always been a money-losing proposition. They are meant to be that. They are not an investment. I have investments. I don’t just sit around and stare at them. No, hobbies are something that I do with my spare time and my spare money for personal enjoyment and enrichment, nothing more.
I do it because I like it. I do it because I enjoy it. My reward is the happiness I get from engaging in the hobby. Any money that I spend on it is lost. Any time, whatever value I place on my time, is lost. It’s kind of like going out to dinner. I go out, I spend money to eat something that, while in the moment might be pleasurable, in the long term, does nothing for me. It… goes away. I get hungry again and eat something else. It was just an enjoyable thing to do in the moment. I get nothing for it in the long term.
That’s what a hobby is to me. I’ve spent a lot of money on my hobbies in my lifetime. I could easily buy a house, probably a couple of houses, based on what I have lying around that I have collected over the years. So what? There are people who desperately want to recoup that money though and spend it on their retirement. That’s not me. I have plenty of money. My retirement is not dependent on selling my collection on eBay. When I spent the money, it wasn’t anything that I needed to survive. It was spare money. It was money that I had budgeted for my own personal enjoyment. I got that enjoyment. I still do. I don’t need this money.
If someone wants to sell it all after I’m dead, more power to them. I have no problem with that at all. If they want to light it all on fire, that’s fine with me too. I’ll be dead. I won’t care. I’m not collecting this as a historian. I’m not collecting it for posterity. I’m collecting it because I like it. I had the time and the money to put together a collection that I got a lot of enjoyment out of. When I’m gone, it won’t matter. I got what I wanted out of it. Now someone else can do what they want with it. I won’t care.
I get that not everyone can say that. That’s a separate issue. That’s a matter of hard work and responsible living and far beyond the purview of this blog. I can only say what I do. I can’t say what you should do. That’s up to you and the best of luck on that. I can only say that, if people did what I do, then all these issues would go away. I don’t care what my stamps are worth. I know, for insurance reasons, but I don’t care. I don’t sit there with a spreadsheet, and I have seen people saying this, pouring through auction results so they know what their stamps are “worth”.
They’re not “worth” anything like that. They are “worth” whatever someone is willing to give you for them, nothing more. As I am never going to sell, I don’t care. I have more time to enjoy collecting because I don’t have to care about the minutia. I’ve done the hard work and made the money that allows me to enjoy what I do in my free time. I have no ego. I’m not trying to show off. I’m doing what makes me happy and at the end of the day, who really needs more than that? Not I, my friend. Not I.
