As a collector of stamps since prehistoric times, I thought that I would add my two cents’ worth on these topics. For a number of years my main collection was Great Britain. During the formation of the collection I always used the hingeless mounts because it was impossible to find truly peelable hinges. The GB collection was terminated in 1990 because of the increasing amount of commemorative wallpaper and the virtually impossible task of separating the Machins. Some day this collection will be sold and I have the understanding that an auction house will only look at the few stamps with high catalog values to be pulled out and listed separately. These will be the only stamps carefully examined to see whether they are MNH. The remaining stamps would be sold as a lot irrespective of all MNH or not. So why bother spending all the time carefully placing the MNH in mounts except for high value stamps? If this happened to be a US collection one would spend more on the mounts than many hundreds of the 3 and 4 cent commemoratives are worth.

My current interest is collecting worldwide used issues up to 1955. This avoids the problem of gum completely. During the preparation of a stamp for hinging I usually soak off the abundant layer of old hinges and any remaining gum. Thus I can determine whether a stamp has thin spots and often can see the watermark while the stamp is soaking.

The current pricing by Scott on issues prior to 1960 is ridiculous as they now use “very fine” as the standard. Many of my worldwide stamps come from a dealer who sends me album pages from which I can pick and choose. Most of these stamps are in a nice collectable condition; but, if I had to use Scott’s definition of “VF”, I would have to reject 95% of the stamps as unsuitable. Their old criterion of “F-VF” was perfectly suitable as this was feasible for most issues except for many of the 19th and early 20th century stamps which invariably have perforations running up to one or two sides of the stamp due to the close spacing between stamps. Have you ever looked at an APS book that truly has “VF” stamps from the above periods? The seller invariably prices his or her stamps based upon “VF” values even though the stamps are way out of line. So the bottom line is to enjoy your collecting and not bother with “VF MNH”.