How To Sort Stamps For Your Collection
Unless you buy single stamps or stamp sets that come packaged in individual glassine envelopes, any stamps you acquire will have to be sorted, to some extent, before they can be added to your album.
Sorting stamps makes it more pleasant to work on your collection. It's easier, for example, to work on a single country at-a-time than it is to pick up a stamp, mount it, pick-up another stamp, move to that country, mount it, and so forth.
How you sort your stamps will, of course, depend on what you have to work on and how much experience you have with stamp collecting. For a small group of mixed stamps you might sort by country, if you've purchased a recent on-paper mix from a country with heavy duplicatin, you would sort by stamp design, if sorting a packet from a single country, you would probably sort by sets, and so forth.
If you are new to the stamp collecting and have, as suggested on our home page, just purchased a world wide album and a packet of 1000-2000 world wide stamps to place into your album, you will sort differently than an experienced collector who can identity almost all, if not all of the stamps that come his way.
Let's assume you are that new collector and have followed purchased a packet of of 1000-2000 different world wide stamps, here is the sensible way to proceed:
Begin by sorting the stamps from your packet into 3 separate piles. Those that you can identify, those you think you can guess at, and those about which you don't have a clue.
Pile one, the stamps you can identify will include the English speaking countries of the world. Countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, and many other nations can be read right from their stamps.
Pile two, the stamps you think you can guess at, might include countries that leave a clue because there is some similarity between their English name and the name in their native language. For example, maybe you suspect that Polska means Poland, Eire means Ireland, Italia means Italy, and Francaises means France. But you aren't certain. Any stamps of that kind would go into pile two.
Pile three, is for the stamps about which you don't have a clue. Some stamps will have strange characters. These might include stamps from Japan, China, Korea, and many others. Some will have characters you can read but can't decipher. Maybe SHQIPERIA, which is Albania, or NOYTA, which is Russia. Some will have even more subtle clues as to their origin. They will go into pile three as well. If you are new to collecting, pile three will probably be your largest pile. If you are experienced, it might be the smallest.
The stamps in piles two and three should be set aside, and depending on the size of pile one, should be sorted into countries if small, or alphabetically, if large. Once broken down into countries, those stamps are ready to be placed in your album.
While working with your album, you may come across countries with characteristics of some of the stamps you placed in piles two and three. To make these pages easier to find when you are ready, bookmark them with a strip of paper or something similar to make them easier to find when you are ready.
In working through your album to mount the stamps you can identify, you will probably find clues that will further help you to identify stamps from piles two and three. As you go through these piles a second time, place what you can now identify after your trip through your album into pile one and continue as before.
Anything that's left after you've exhausted the clues clues found in your album can be checked against a stamp finder. You might have one in your album, or you can find one online.