It's All Part of the Job: "Valuable" Collectibles and Disappointment

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me his box of old postage stamps that he'd gotten from various places, because he knew that I am somewhat of an expert on stamps.

Some very old postage stamps from Sweden

Oh No, Not Again...

I got very close to telling him not to bother, once I learned from him that these were stamps he found partly out of a pawn shop and partly at an antique mall. Experience has taught me that those are not the places where you're going to find anything "amazing."

But — because he's a friend — I agreed for him to send me the box which he promptly did... and spent almost $80 on postage, because it was kind of heavy!

Alas — and sadly, for my friend — I was not terribly surprised by what I found in the box... which pretty much amounted to nothing of significant value. In fact, there are some doubts in my mind as to whether it's even worth the $80 it cost to ship it.

What Can We Learn, Here?

The moral of the story here can be applied to most collectibles.

People tend to read things, or hear things, about some particular type of collectible item, and usually their impression is centered around how somebody "found something in Grandma's attic" and it was worth $5,000. The rub in this particular situation is of course that we only hear about these amazing stories, but never about the tens of thousands of times there is "a box of something" in Grandma's Attic and the only thing it's worthy of is being hauled to the nearest trash dump!

In most cases, old doesn't mean valuable, and in even more cases "old" typically means that something has been sitting for a long time and wasn't well taken care of, and so it's old and moldy. But people generally overlook that part of the equation.

The problem with "I found this amazing box of stamps at an antique mall" is that people who run antique malls usually know a lot about collectibles and so if there truly was an amazing box of stamps you can be almost 100% sure it has been "Cherry Picked" down to the bone and all the truly valuable stuff taken out of there and sold to the highest bidder at a public auction, leaving only the "chaff" behind.

And that is really the part of what I do for one of my livings that I enjoy the least: I have to step up to the plate and make people who are filled with hope very disappointed about their reality.

I started trading old coins and stamps when I was at University as a way to make some extra money so I could afford to live. And over the years I got quite good at it!

The thing people forget about truly rare items is that they are... well... RARE. As in, you almost never find any. If "everybody" could find them, they wouldn't actually be rare, would they?

In the course of some 40 years or so the number of times where I found true treasure in a box of stamps or something otherwise collectible from "Grandma's attic" can probably be counted on one hand. Most of the time, what I end up looking at is pretty much worthless.

And so, I had to gently let my friend know that there was nothing of value in his box of stamps... and that the $50 or so (not to mention the $80 worth of shipping he paid!) the stamps cost him was probably too much.

Thanks for reading, and have a great Friday!

How about you? Have you ever found something "rare" in family belongings? Or did you uncover unexpected treasure at a flea market? What happened with it? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2023.08.10 22:53 PDT
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