As a beginner, sorting one's stamps is fairly simple. You merely sort them out into little piles and go at them. As one progresses, the sorting business needs to develop into a process so that time is not wasted by repeated sortings of the same stamps.

The use of a stockbook as a staging platform is one of the first organizational steps that a collector can take. One simply uses a stockbook as a way to sort stamps before they are mounted in one's album. Since I collect worldwide, this process, for me, has evolved over the years into two, three-inch stockbooks. These dealer stockbooks are occasionally available filled with junk from odd-lot dealers and should never be passed up as long as they are priced cheaply. I use one for my regular stamps. I divide it by page with each page holding stamps for an album area (one page for Central America, one page for South America, one page for Mexico, etc). Into this book goes stamps that I know I don't have, and they sit there until there are enough of them to warrant getting out the appropriate album in which to mount my latest acquisitions. The second stockbook is for perfins, precancels, foreign revenues, cinderellas, cut squares and anything else I am not sure what I want to do with. However, for the beginner, a small stock book is a nice start as a place to put stuff until one has the time to deal with it.

Another method used by a lot of collectors in my stamp club is what I call the two shoe box method, and it is probably the best and most cost effective method that exists for beginners to the intermediate area. The first thing you do is to start saving all the return envelopes that come with the junk mail; if you are a neatness freak, then you simply buy several boxes of cheap envelopes at the next office supply sale. Next, you will need two shoe boxes or you can use envelope boxes or anything that will hold envelopes. In the first box, you label envelopes for each country or grouping for stamps as they come in. Thereafter, any stamps that come from the soaking table or from trade or whatever, go into the appropriate envelope until it is time to mount them. Then when it is mounting time, you bring out one envelope at a time, compare the contents to what is in your album, mount what is new and make a pile of the duplicates. In the second shoe box, you create a bunch of new labeled envelopes and into these go your duplicates. Why not just throw the duplicates into a box and forget them you say? Well, you will find that time and again you will want to go through a portion of your duplicates looking for one thing or another. Why have to sort through everything again when, with very little extra effort, you could have kept them sorted. As an example, after 30 years of collecting I became interested in the precancels of the Netherlands. Instead of having to sort through pounds of off-paper, junk, foreign stamps, I had only to look through one cigar box of Netherlands duplicates to find some precancels. I had a one hour job instead of a months work. Organize, it will save you all kinds of time in the long run.

What to do with duplicates is a continuing problem for a lot of collectors. One way to deal with the problem is to never buy anything that will cause you to acquire duplicates. There are several members of my stamp club who operate this way. What this means is that your acquisition of stamps is slowed down greatly as you acquire more, and you soon become one of those collectors who is always looking at everything and never adding very much. The most economical way to expand your collection is to buy lots and collections, and you cannot do this very often if you don't want to deal with duplicates. For many collectors, the shoe box full of envelopes is the way to go. For myself, it didn't work very well after about five years of collecting. If you buy mixtures, you end up with too many stamps to keep in envelopes. In addition, if you get into trading, finding stuff in envelopes can be rather time consuming. What I did was to use three-ring notebooks and manila stockpages. I bought some new but I also have acquired a lot of used ones from collections I have purchased. I sort my stamps onto stock pages by country putting three copies of each face different in little piles across the page. Stamps that I get more than three extra copies of go into a cardboard cigar box labeled for that country. Extras, beyond three, of small countries just go into an envelope in a box. When the number of stamps in that envelope start to overflow, I add another cigar box. This allows me to get to my duplicates for trading or rechecking without extensive re-sorting. I realize that my duplicate situation is very different than for most collectors. A long time ago I decided I was only going to go after cheap stamps and that I was not going to spend big bucks for completeness like a lot of collectors eventually do. I realized that what I enjoyed was filling spaces and that I could fill a lot more cheap spaces than I could expensive ones. When you do this, you end up a worldwide collector with lots of duplicates, and you have to organize them or you might as well burn them.