For those who can furnish The American Philatelic Foundation with a general description of your collection, please read the following that will not only help us but seriously help you in determining if your collection is valuable.

 

1. If the collection is in printed albums please name the publisher such as Minkus, Scott, White Ace, etc.

2. What are the contents? Such as “a world wide collection starting with A countries and ending with Z countries.”

3. Are there any albums that contain just one country such as The United States, or France, or Germany etc.?

4. If a US collection is involved please look at the 1847 issue (the space contains room for two stamps first a five-cent Ben Franklin (brown) and secondly a ten-cent George Washington in black; are either or both present, check the 1893 issue of fifteen stamps depicting Christopher Columbus; are all fifteen there? If your US collection is nearly complete (uncancelled only) from 1901-1917 please comment. In the air-post section are the three Graff Zeppelin stamps in the album (C13-15) issued in 1930.

5. Are the stamps mostly cancelled or mostly not cancelled?

6. How full are the albums? Most issues of stamps come in sets of a few to as many as fifteen stamps usually starting at a penny and going to a dollar, five dollars or from one pence to one pound; are there many complete sets to the highest value?

7. Most collections have numerous miscellaneous stamps in boxes, folders, first day of issues, envelopes etc; these usually are not an important part of the collection. The printed albums usually represent the better part.

8. First Day Covers, mint sheets from the post office are not usually valuable unless dated before 1930.

 

Hope this helps you furnish us with a description to better help you. We are a non-profit 501 Foundation here to direct the public to get a proper appraisal.