Time killed any chance the late Melbourne art and antique dealer Mr Julian Sterling may have had for one last go at replicating the prosperity of his earlier forays into collecting.
A man who had been used to building markets over a long period and watching them grow, Mr Sterling entered the stamp market in a serious way with his typical zeal and enthusiasm in his early 80s at the turn of the new millennium.
He did not live long enough to create the surges of interest that his seasoned buying produced in the antiques, art and classic car markets, dying in 2011 before he could complete the collection.
Mossgreen Auctions, which is to sell his stamp collection for an estimated $3 million in 600 lots over three equal value auctions, has advised his family, who are the beneficiaries, that it will be hard the to obtain the prices he paid dealers and auctioneers for many of the items.
He paid solid prices in a last frantic bid to implement his usual successful strategy of selling a collection built on the momentum he had partly created.
Concentrating on Commonwealth stamps (King George heads) that were being used when he was a boy, he bought many prize specimens from collections, including that of natural health foods retailer Arthur Gray ($7 million) in March 2007, and others being dribbled onto the market.
But he died and was beaten in putting his on the market by two other collections, that of mining chief Hugh Morgan in November 2012 ($3.3 million),and Adelaide pharmacist Stuart Hardie ($3 million in May 2013).
Mr Sterling also missed the boat for the centenary of Commonwealth stamps which was celebrated last year.
The collection came about as a result of family links with the Kino family which numbers two very keen philatelists and it was this connection which kindled Mr Sterling's interest.
The collection is new and well focussed without the remnants of a schoolboy passion from which so many diversified collections originated.
Charles Leski, part owner of and stamp specialist at Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, says that estimates and reserves have been trimmed to take into account possible fatigue in the marketplace.
The market in Commonwealth and State issues is also being buoyed by the entry of a new generation of fifty to sixty year olds who have been paid out their superannuation and are enjoying it and/or including stamps in their self-funded superannuation schemes.
New buyers are at an age when they want to de-clutter and an enormous amount of wealth can be consolidated between the covers of a stamp album.
Stamp collecting does not take up a lot of room so the oldies in downsized dwelling spaces have little cause to worry about spreading their stamps out to inspect. Mr Leski points out that it is also a hobby that can be easily shared by the mobility-impaired as stamps are easily collected and enjoyed at home.
Yet it is still an affordable hobby with specimens that can excite an extraordinary amount of passion available for lower three figure sums including some of the 600 lots in the Sterling collection.
Stamps are also the one indisputable great international collectable that Australia has produced thanks to Australia's romantic postal history of deliveries by pioneering international flights and wild outback mail runs sometimes by exotic vehicles such as camel trains.
Stamps from Australia also entranced collectors from the first through the representation of our wild fauna and unusual flora.
Mossgreen was the successful tenderer from six, including two of which came were overseas.
Overseas collectors also now have the added stimulus of a weaker dollar - not that exchange rates should unduly worry two big overseas buyers in the market for Commonwealth stamps. They are Lord Vestey with historic ties to the Australian meat industry and a secret Japanese buyer whose identity is closely held by, and known only to one or two leading lights in the philatelic business. Mossgreen is taking a selection of the stamps which will be individually presented and lotted, to London for viewing in the Regis Convention Centre near Trafalgar Square, close to the traditional heartland of philately, the Strand.
Another, Japanese buyer is selling his collection of Tasmanian stamps this year in one of three global events that highlight the stamp market's internationalism and the large sums that can be associated with tiny specimens as in the Audrey Hepburn/ Cary Grant movie Charade.
“I love the stamps of the British Empire, and chose to collect Tasmania because it represented for me dignity, beauty and rarity”, said Koichi Sato, Japanese stamp collector, when he won the National Grand Prix in Australia in 1999 for his collection which is to go under the hammer at David Feldman's Geneva rooms on June 27
Last year Mr Sato presented the collection once more and won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at the Melbourne International Exhibition. This award is given for the best collection among collections that have already achieved the highest awards.
Adding to its “glamour”, with over 75,000 mostly illiterate convicts being transported to Tasmania, there were few penal residents who could read or write and as a result little correspondence is known from the early times. This made early stamps and stamps used on covers particularly rare. This helps explain why antiquarian book dealers and librarians have lately been appearing at stamp auctions.
The other global event is the dispersal of the John E du Pont collection mostly through David Feldman's but with the world's rarest stamp from that collection, the unique (but ugly and damaged) one cent British Guiana, being offered by Sotheby's in New York in June with an estimate of $US10 million to $US20 million.
Often credited as the most valuable stamp in the world, du Pont bought this stamp for a then world record price of $US935,000 in 1980.
Feldman which will sell the Tasmanian and du Pont collection (excluding the 1c magenta) on June 27 in Geneva sold the Treskilling Yellow of Sweden for CHF 2,875,000 in 1996 and the most expensive philatelic item, the Mauritius Bordeaux Cover sold for CHF 6,123,500 in 1993.
Bonhams and Goodman coaxed six pictures out of Mr Sterling for its August 2008 sale. The works were flattered with their own catalogue, which may have expedited the deal. Bonhams & Goodman also sold some of Mr Sterling's car collection in 2000 for $2.8 million. Shannons later cleared the balance.
But Mossgreen evidently made a particularly strong impression with the sale of the Sterling prize collection of antique Buddha's in 2007.
Mr Leski says to win the collection the company replicated the past arrangements it had with the family which included some of the more sophisticated inclusions now familiar to the industry such as profit sharing on items which make over a certain amount.
Although Mr Sterling was an earnest filler of collection gaps in the traditional style of stamp collecting, he did not have to be told that it was increasingly not the stamp itself which commands big money but the imprint or overprint. Overprints have been known to turn a stamp's value from $3000 to $85,200.
The collection includes several very special lots to which this applies, one of the most notable being a block of four two pound kangaroos of 1931 which cost the original purchaser the extraordinary sum of eight pounds at the post office counters when first purchased. The outlay was equal to two weeks wages. Only a very lucky few now earn fortnightly the $30,000 to $40,000 now expected for this lot.
A corner strip of 1913 kangaroo issue (15 shillings face value) is expected to make $50,000 to $70,000 thanks to its printers name in the margin.
Although auction cataloguing is only now beginning the Julian Sterling Philatelic Auctions are estimated to make $3 million with its value expected to be spread equally over three auctions on April 30, May 27 and June 24.