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from the sufficiently-broad-definitions dept.
To me, it looked like a child's crude attempt at a mosaic. About a dozen small square tiles of different colours. Glued to the wall in a geometric design vaguely resembling a face with two square eyes.
It stood out in the otherwise empty and dingy Paris flat. Once my home, I was moving back in, after nearly 20 years away. My tenants, three young single men, were showing me round before they left.
"What's that?" I asked, pointing at the cluster of tiles.
"That's by Invader," my tenant replied. "He's a street artist. He's like a French Banksy."
I quite liked Banksy, but the young man must have seen that I didn't appear overly impressed by his French counterpart.
"You must leave this," he said earnestly. "One day it will be worth a lot of money."
Being British, I nodded politely - but inwardly I chortled at the notion that a few tiles stuck on a bedroom wall could ever be considered a work of art.
[...] It was bigger, but otherwise similar to the one I'd unceremoniously stripped out of my flat.
Invader was a global phenomenon, famous in New York, Hong Kong, London, and of course Paris.
Then came the real blow. To my horror, I learned that one of his works had sold for more than €200,000 (£178,000; $233,000).
So, I had this guy named Claude staying in my place who painted a picture on the wall...what was his name, dear? Oh, right, Monet. But I wanted the room painted fuchsia so I told the painters to get rid of it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:26AM (12 children)
A friend and I inherited the contents of our older friend's house (friend died with no children or other relatives). The house is filled with postage stamps, seems that their parent collected stamps starting c.1900, there must be something over 20 000 stamps and only about a quarter are sorted into books. There are even thousands of cancelled stamps, saved from envelopes from around the world (they had a large correspondence, at one time).
How can we know that we aren't tossing away a valuable stamp? Or being hoodwinked by a dealer (or a few dealers that collude with each other)?
Other things in the house have more obvious value and can be price checked fairly easily.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:35AM (8 children)
"How can we know that we aren't tossing away a valuable stamp? Or being hoodwinked by a dealer (or a few dealers that collude with each other)?"
Research, of course. I collected coins, and that is comparatively easy. They are easy to identify, date, and grade. There are many catalogs available, listing a coin's value. Stamps take a little more work. But, if you plan to sell them, that work is a necessity.
Either work, or trust those dealers. You really don't have many other choices. Maybe you can pawn off the research on some kid with lots of time on his/her hands. You'll have to give him some real motivation to do all that work. You may even have to trust him. How can you know that he doesn't carry home a couple moderately valuable stamps every time he goes home? Gonna strip search him? YOU PEDO!!
Just do the research yourself. You'll be a better person for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:12AM (7 children)
Or course, if you want something done right do it yourself, no quibble with that, but some people have a busy life already.
How long does it take to research a stamp? If AC gets good, could it be as fast as five minutes on average, is that possible? If there are 20,000 that is 100K minutes or 1666 hours, approaching a full year of 40 hour weeks.
(Score: 3, Funny) by KiloByte on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:31AM (4 children)
Do this research on a sample of randomly selected stamps. Those considered especially rare tend to be put prominently of display, and it is those which you want to research first.
I'm unlucky[1] to have a father who's a collector of razor blade wrappers, this takes a good part of his life and money for over 30 years. A mid-sized collection is easily worth $10-20k when mindlessly dumped in bulk; my father's is far bigger than that. I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to sell it, though (and I hope this issue doesn't arise any time soon).
[1]. I mean, having a father is not that bad, I'd prefer one without this addiction, though.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:00AM (2 children)
Seriously? Razor blade wrappers? Sorry, no offense to your dad, but WTF?
Hmmm. Maybe I should start collecting candy bar wrappers or mac & cheese boxes. Apparently, people will pay money for anything!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:16AM (1 child)
Weirdest collection I've heard of is sugar packets -- the ones that restaurants put on the tables. Don't think these have any monetary value, but I could be wrong. And I suspect SN posters will come up with something even weirder!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:43AM
AOL shipped CDs in metal cans, wood boxes, and so many other weird contraptions. They'd do whatever they could to catch your eye.
They'd give you a 30-day free trial, limited to some number of hours. The amount of hours kept increasing until it was roughly the amount in 30 days.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:32AM
Just count yourself lucky that you don't have to handle and categorize tens of thousands of razor blades!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:19PM (1 child)
I suspect that a lot of stamps, probably the bulk of them, can average five or ten minutes' work. There will be some that defy you. Very uncommon stamps may be very hard to identify. Yet, that uncommon one that took the most work may well be the most valuable stamp in the collection.
Of course, the more you learn, the better and faster you would become at identifying something unique. After you've been at it for a decade, you will find it hard to believe that it took you six months just to identify something that is now obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:48PM
You're working at this far too hard. Just ask Stanleyhttps://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Stanley_Howler [lspace.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:22PM
The original stamp collector may be a help here. If they had some idea of the value or rarity of what they were collecting, then how they treated the stamps may indicate the relative value of them. But if they're collecting them in a typical OCD fashion (like in coins, making sure they have all the years represented), then what's been sorted and displayed may be of little use to you (unless a rare stamp happens to find its way into a display book).
Really, unless you're fully researching these stamps and then auctioning off this stuff on eBay in appropriate-sized lots (with any hypothetical valuable stamps sold separately), you're not going to get anywhere near the sale price of these stamps.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:59PM
1900? I don't think that there are many really valuable stamps from that period, but you could look for a US air postage stamp the has the plane upside down. That one was pretty rare.
That said, I'm not expert, and haven't collected stamps since grade school. But check what possible valuable there are before, say, 1930. There probably won't be many. For the rest, trust the dealers. Your time is worth something, and there isn't much that wasn't widely collected. (You might check out what "first day covers" look like, though. I don't remember them, and never had one. I know they're more valuable than most stamps, and I think they require cancellation in some special way. But there will only be a few dates that are significant, i.e. the first day any particular stamp went on sale. So that should be relatively easy to check.)
FWIW, most stamp collectors don't have *anything* that's particularly valuable. Many of them are just hoarders that happened to settle on stamps instead of something else. Even coin collectors don't usually have anything thats particularly valuable...though it's not unusual for someone (either them, or a relative) to think that they do.
Of course, "most" is a statement of probability. Sometimes someone does have something valuable, even if they don't know it. But it's a low probability kind of thing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday November 06 2017, @01:58AM
Another option is to divvy them up into lots and sell them on eBay as "unsearched" stamps and see what you can get for them, preferably with a really good story to go with it . I don't know about stamps so much, but it's a pretty common thing on the coin side, done mostly by sellers who I suspect actually have a pretty good idea what's in their "unsearched" lots.