Whenever someone comes into possession of a collection that they did not put together, there are a lot of questions and a fair amount of confusion. This is normal. In the non-collector world, terms like Flips, 2×2’s, Mounts, Hinges, Glassine, Watermark Fluid etc. are odd and without meaning but to a collector they are the language we use every day. 

Below is a list of Do’s & Don’ts. It is not a complete list but if you follow these few suggestions, it will absolutely help you in the long run.

1. 1. 1. Don’t throw anything away! We have a trash, if it needs to be tossed, we’ll do it. Too many times people have thrown out the good stuff because they had no idea what they were looking at. A torn newspaper stamp, rescued from an incinerator sold for $9 million dollars. You don’t know what you are looking at and we do.
      2. Don’t Organize it! Trust me, you probably won’t do it correctly and will cause extra work to put it back in order.
      3. Do bring EVERYTHING! This means catalogs, tools, all the little boxes of supplies etc. They might be worth money, you never know.
      4. Do bring any receipts, logs, documents, notebooks etc.!  Collectors tend to keep excellent records and these can be very helpful.
      5. Do expect to leave the collection for an extended period of time!  We can do it fast or we can do it right. We can’t do both, you need to pick one.
      6. Don’t make an inventory for us! If you want to spend time making an inventory, that’s up to you but we won’t use it, we have proprietary software that we built custom for our own use and that is all we use.
      7. Do look through it for personal items! We have found birth certificates, bonds, stock certificates that were live. (We buy broken stock certs by the way), family photos and love letters! Often these letters have deep emotional value.  Remove these first because we throw the letters away. The value if any is in the cover (a fancy word for envelope) unless the writer is someone extremely famous and you would already know that.

 

There it is, The Big 7!  If you follow these 7 simple rules, you will avoid all of the common errors and you might end up with a surprise!