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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: 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.
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