Mount Kiloware

Ha ha! Good old Bear Boxes!

Riiiiigggghhhhttt, we all believe you Admin Bear 

As an aside... jealous right now for that kinda pile of kiloware 

This has to be a world record!

So, whatever happened with that lot ronnie?

Though a bit late responding to this - the photo you see at the top of this thread is about 3/4 Bear Box and the rest is US kiloware from another source. The US Kiloware has been first sorted - I broke it down into "Christmas", "Love", "Nondenominated", "Flags", , "Back of Book", "Definitives" and "Commemoratives". The Definitives and Commemoratives have been broken down by denomination, Love, Christmas, Nondenominated and Back of Book have all been sorted down to Scott Number and placed into stock - I'll fill a number of spaces with that alone. Once I get my spare bedroom back (another month or so) I can get back to sorting and it shouldn't take long to finish the US from there I can start using what's sorted to fill spaces. Looking at the empty spaces in my albums - mostly post-1995 - I feel confident I'll fill the vast majority if not all of those spaces.

The worldwide part of the kiloware has a long ways to go but that's because of the sheer volume (I think I bought five Bear Boxes). The Bear Boxes have yielded a lot of topicals, Machins, Germany, Austria, Poland, Canada and Western Europe. There's a good bit of Australia and New Zealand as well but lots of duplication with those two nations. Loads and loads of Central and South America.

The Bear Boxes and a few other kiloware items I've picked up along the way have resulted in the following:
* I now consider myself collecting worldwide
* I now collect Germany - a nation I'd long considered collecting
* Austria - because it's like Germany Lite
* My Canada collection is looking pretty good!
* Poland is looking even better than Canada
* Considering starting "One From Each Country"
* My ex-wife has a very nice start on an Australia collection.
* I now collect Machins
* I now collect US Canal Zone
* In the end I'll have trade bait coming out of my ears

Still in all the best find from the Bear Boxes is this jewel - an offset printed US Sc #1610. The crazy thing is despite over 20 pounds of kiloware I found this within the first half hour of sorting the first pile from the first box. The CV on this strip of three is triple what I paid for the whole shooting match. Suffice it to say I haven't run across anything quite like this again but then I do still have a LOT left to sort so you never know!

(Disclaimer: I'm not Ron. But I am an old kiloware hound.)

With most kiloware, you'll get a ton of duplication. It's also a major-league time sink. That said, there are benefits.

It's a pretty cost-effective way of filling spaces.

Some beautiful sidelights come into play. My recent acquisitions have been, mostly, Germany and Poland, and I love the postmarks. Germany switched to a Briefzentrum (Mail Center) system a few years ago, so most items are postmarked Briefzentrum 01 through Briefzentrum 99. But that's OK, kind of; I'm trying to snag all 99 of 'em in action, and making pretty good progress. Before that, Germany tended to have neat, legible postmarks, and there's like 80 million towns and villages there. I've been hypnotized by road maps almost since I was born, so I think this is a lot of fun. Germany also has a lot of pictorial and commemorative postmarks.

Poland also has very legible postmarks, and their town names are great. Did you know that there's a town in Poland named Police? Yeah, true fact! It's up near Szczecin, which is also a very fun name.

Kiloware is also excellent for finding color variations and for various forms of flyspecking.

Kiloware varies in quality enormously. Swan Philatelic Imports is erratic, but when they're good, they're very good. I got one lot on eBay which was supposed to be a huge bundle of kiloware from Chile. It was, but I ended up with over 1,000 copies of one stamp, a common one from the 1950s, and almost nothing I could add to my collection. It wasn't even that great for postmarks.

If postmarks and looking for variations in recent definitives don't appeal to you, you might be better off buying collections- somebody else's album, or fragments thereof; the good stuff may or may not have been stripped - or packets - 400 Sweden stamps or 200 Greek stamps or whatever; usually they'll be the 400, or 200, lowest catalogue values possible. I personally like collections because there's more of a "treasure hunt" aspect, but packets are probably the most efficient way to kickstart a country or topical collection.