Alan Roy, a postal worker from Dorset, England, had a pretty normal hobby. Like a lot of folks around the world, Alan was into stamp collecting. Being a postal worker, he had access to some pretty cool stamps, and most folks have no problem with you peeling off the stamp after the mail is delivered. However, Roy took things a bit farther than your average stamp enthusiast, amassing a serious 2-million-piece stamp collection before he passed on at age 76.
No one actually knows the value of Alan’s collection, because no one is quite sure what’s in it. After all, he’d been collecting stamps for 70 years and picked up an average of 30,000 stamps a year. The collection breaks down as a million stamps from Britain; half-a-million from Ireland; 400,000 from the rest of the world; and an impressive 50,000 Christmas stamps.
Auctioneer David Elliott estimates that the time it would take one person to sort all those stamps and assign a value to them is, roughly, 70 years. Considering how long it took one person to gather all the stamps, that’s not an exaggeration!
Tags: postal worker saves 2 million stamps, world’s largest stamp collection, gigantic stamp collection, stamps, unusual collections, auctions, Alan Roy, Dorset, England, David Elliot
