Friday, September 18, 2015

RIP Marvin Frey...and the question of sourcing stamps for your collection.

Heard the sad news earlier this week that the owner of Bellmore Philatelics in Massapequa Park, New York, Marvin Frey, had passed away.  I have been dealing with Bellmore off and on for many years. I was a huge fan of their "in home approval service" where they would send out an assortment of old albums, dealer cards etc and let you pick the items you wanted at a percent of Scott catalog value.  For me it was a wonderful way to re-activate my collecting interest after several years away, and most of my French Colonial purchases made over the past few years have been via Bellmore.

Alas, with the passing of Mr Frey, Bellmore announced that it will no longer be providing its approval service.

For me this brings up a question that all collectors have to deal with. What is the best way to source items for your collection?  These days, the internet of course provides the collector with options to purchase items that simply did not exist before the Internet Revolution. Before you were limited to what local dealers (or dealers within your country) could offer, and comparison price shopping was at the same time quite difficult.

Today though the collector is truly blessed with a cornucopia of options, from general auction sites such as eBay to collectibles markets such as Delcampe (my favorite) or Zillions of Stamps, to all sorts of individual dealers who do maintain strong internet presences posting their pricing and stock lists for all to see. There are also several approval services, my favorite being the approval branch of British auction company Universal Philatelic Auctions. They provide amazing customer service and work very hard to send you selections to look over that fit your collecting interests.

In some ways today is definitely the best of times to be a collector, since it is now much easier to find the items that you want for your collection AND be able to compare prices to find the best deal to fit your budget.

Still, I am going to miss receiving those approval selections from Bellmore. It was a fun way to pass an afternoon and allowed me to exactly see the condition of the stamps I was going to purchase. Sadly it's increasingly rare to find approval services that give you the luxury of viewing at home first before you buy. Pictures on the web of front and back of stamps help, but there is nothing like seeing the actual stamp in person before you buy to make you feel confident you are purchasing what you want, and of course there are lots of horror stories about items listed on eBay or other sites that turn out not to be as described. But as the excellent service from UPA shows, stamp dealers that provide approvals still do exist.

5 comments:

  1. I was always intrigued about Bellmore Philatelics, and their in-home approval service, but I never got around to ordering from them. Sorry to hear about this.

    Don't forget about local or regional sources- I got a huge boost in stamp inventory by being a member of our local stamp club, where fellow stamp collectors and local dealers were aware that I collected the world. Lots of leads- and purchases developed from that. :-)

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  2. Humm, I went to my first local stamp club meeting last month, and I was very disappointed. There was about 10-12 guys who basically sat around and small-talked for the hour. No information provided, no stamps for sell, nothing. In addition to myself, there was another newcomer, and they barely even said hello to us. Needless to say, I will not be going back there.

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  3. Hi Chris sorry to hear you had a bad experience at your first stamp club meeting. Alas a lot of stamp clubs tend to be more -old boys networks- where if you are an outsider you don't get much of a friendly welcome, which is a shame. Thankfully web forums such as Stampboards.com and Stampcommunity.org can provide the kind of networking and camaraderie that stamp clubs used to provide (and some still do, being very welcoming of new members interested in the hobby)

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  4. One dealer that I have been dealing with for a few years said that he was going to try to offer an approval service and asked if I'd be interested in receiving pre-1940 WW stamps. I took him up on the offer and got a few selections via mail. After that, he said that there was not enough interest in the approvals, and he was not going to continue them.

    While it was fun receiving the stamps in the mail to look over (I did this a lot as a kid), in this day and age of the Internet, it just seems more efficient to go online somewhere and order exactly the stamps that you need rather than having to hope that you get something you can use and then having to ship back the rest.

    I basically felt the same way the one time I tried the APS circuits...Guess the Internet has made me lazy!

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    1. Yes in a sense the internet has been a great boon for trying to hunt down the items you want for your collection. BUT it definitely lacks that "cozy" feeling you get when you can look at the stamp right in front of you and judge for yourself if it meets the standards you set for your collection. It's more "impersonal" now, for lack of a better word, but in the end I would argue the benefits outweigh that particular drawback about the retail process.

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