With apologies to Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, who meant it in another way entirely, this post is about displaying the condition of the stamps listed in my offer lists. It starts out sort of depressing, but by the end, it gets positive and exciting. Three trading partners have specifically requested this feature, and I would like to have it myself, so I have given this a LOT of thought. Bear with me through the first part, but keep your expectations up.
I acquired most of my material by purchasing large lots, a few very large lots, and including about 30 redboxes of 102 cards. As I sort through the stuff for a country, I mount stamps in my main albums, and add duplicates to the stock in the boxes. There are now about 50 redboxes, and I expect that there will be over a hundred, if I live long enough to go through the entire collection. Just now Canada is in progress. So far, the number of inventoried and listed duplicates in my tradestock comes to about 35,000 varieties, with from one to a couple dozen copies of each variety, or about 140,000 individual stamps. So far.
Using my current method, I can just flip through the cards, ticking a checkbox on my computer screen to indicate which stamp varieties I have. (My database includes a record of every stamp ever issued, not just stamps I have.) I do much the same for the stamps mouted in my album. My computer then prepares both want lists and offer lists automatically. The problem with showing condition is not in the computer or the software or the listings — they could be done very fast regardless of the content. The difficulty is that to know the condition of each stamp, I would have to examine every single stamp in the entire inventory. I can’t just glance at the number on the card and tick a box. I would have to examine every single stamp, and provide for multiple available conditions for each variety. The number above, the 140,000, is only the beginning backlog for the project. The actual number of duplicates will eventually be at least three times that.
I tried it. Really, I did some time trials. I used a significant sized sample (about a thousand varieties) and timed the process. My calculations show that I would have to suspend all trading for at least 5 years to implement this feature, under realistic but somewhat idealized conditions. This does not consider the brain-dead monotony of the task, which would reduce me to a drooling moron and permanently end my stamp collecting. And that is only to do the starting backlog. This feature cannot be implemented.
This is not the end of the story. Much more positive remarks follow.
So what can I do to make the trading process easier? The first thing that occurred to me was… can I make it easy to process other people’s want lists? Well, yes, I can. If others can send me a want list, I can compare it to my offer list by computer, in almost no time at all. The resulting list I can easily check visually against the cards in the redboxes, and pull those that meet the condition requirements of my partner. To do this, I need some kind of inventory list. I can make it work with almost anything that is not hand written. Any sort of list in notepad, Word, plain text, Excel, in email — virtually anything in print. I could even take printout and scan it. Of course, this requires a bit of work on the part of my partner to type the list, but maybe I can reduce that work, too.
Here is the even better idea: If you tell me which country you want to trade for, I can email to you an Excel spreadsheet that lists all the stamps issued for that country. There will be a column for stamps you have in your collection, and a column for stamps you have duplicates you can trade. Make a mark in the boxes as appropriate, and email it back to me. My software will automatically run the comparisons, and produces lists of tradable stamps that I can pick from my redboxes, and a list of stamps that you could send me. You will not have to wade through my lists at all, and even better, you will have your own inventory of your collection for free and for no additional work. You can make any kind of mark at all in the columns, including condition, count, symbols, notes, whatever you want. For trading purposes, my software will interpret any non-blank cell as “yes.” I have never seen anything like this anywhere else, and I want to give it a try. I estimate that to inventory a country like, um, Sweden, would take you no more than an hour to run through your album, maybe less, and depending on how your duplicates are organized, possibly less for them. So, ya wanna give it a try? eh?
I have an example Excel sheet for Azores prepared. Make a comment below (or anywhere) with your email address, and I will send you a copy.
