Sell Us Your Collection

A Guide To What We Buy And How Best To Deal With Us

We purchase about £700,000 worth of covers a year, they come from a very wide range of places, Worldwide auctions, dealers and of course from collectors like yourself, who we hope this information is helpful to.

What We Don’t Buy

1) We do not buy Philatelic Bureau covers.

The cheapest way always to buy GB FDC has always been from the Post Office either doing it yourself or from the Philatelic Bureau. Think about it. It costs Royal Mail a few pence to print and they sell at £4-£6 sell 200,000 and the profit is fantastic.

Surely 200,000 collectors can’t be wrong?

The trouble is that all of the covers look the same and very few people collect them. This means 95% of all collections offered to us are regrettably of no interest. Years ago I was offered a stock of 100 covers of each issue between 1965-67, each cover had a dreadful postmark and were hand addressed, the only value was as used stamps. However the collector/investor missed two issues and bought from a dealer 100 Battle of Britain which had a small Biggin Hill postmark and Flowers of 1967 which had a Kew Gardens postmark. He probably paid a premium of £10 to the dealer. I would pay today a minimum £4000 for the Battle of Britain and £4000 for the flowers. It probably cost him about £100 at the time the rest basically worthless, I did buy them all but sold the rest to a dealer for a pittance to be cut up for fine used stamps.

2) We do not buy hand addressed First Day Covers.

In general we do not buy hand addressed covers after 1953 unless it happens to be a very rare. Never add your name to a pristine cover, I have seen some superb covers produced by Rembrandt Philatelics where collectors have decided to “personalise” their covers. At best it halves the value depending on your handwriting, but we wouldn’t buy them.

3) We don’t buy covers with unconnected First Day of Issue postmarks after 1966.

Generally after this point there are better, more connected postmarks for each issue, so local postmarks with no connection are worth very little.

4) We buy very few covers after 1977.

There are a few we require and we of course buy our Buckingham series, but generally this is our cut off point as each year saw more and more stamp issues.

So They Are Not For You, Who Will Buy Them?

We can make no guarantees, but some of our suggestions include:

• Give them to a child/some-one just starting collecting.
• Put them in a local auction.
• Sell them via eBay with a low starting price.
• Try a local stamp fair.
• Try your local stamp club.

What Do We Want?

Now we get to the interesting part and these are just some of the areas we are interested in buying:

• Good collections including such covers as the 1924 and 1925 Wembley Exhibition, 1929 PUC low values and obviously the £1, 1935 Silver Jubilee and 1948 Silver Wedding.
• Pre 1952 First Day Covers in good condition.
• 1952 – 1970 Clean Illustrated covers, with a typed, label or no address.
• 1971 – 1977 Clean illustrated covers with a special or connected postmark, label or no address.
• After 1977 has to have a retail of £100 per cover (so very little).
• Buckingham Covers – Yes we buy our own covers and there is a buying list on our website.
• Benham Covers – Early Woodcut or better signed covers.
• Channel Islands World War II Occupation Collections.
• Single rare covers.
• Quantities of the same cover that are clean and interesting, the sort of thing we can offer in our sale magazine.
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And we don’t just buy First Day Covers, we are always interested in good collections, single items or stocks of:

• Great Britain Airmail flights, particularly 1920 – 1950.
• Concorde Covers.
• Illustrated Maritime Covers.
• Zeppelin covers.
• RAF MUSEUM Collections and single items, Special Signed Only.
• Royalty covers Pre 1960.
• 1935 Jubilee Commonwealth Covers.
• 1937 Coronation Commonwealth Covers.
• 1948 Silver Wedding.
• 1953 Coronation.
• Railway Cover Collections.
• Victoria Cross Signatures.
• Autographed covers, we are always interested in rare and unusual signed covers.

And Finally

Please allow us time, we are incredibly busy so it may take us a couple of weeks to get back to you. If you are not sure what you have, photocopy what you consider your best three items and send them to Brian.

Contact Details

Craig Buggins is the office contact who deals with buying and collection advice. 

The Office is open 8:30 – 5pm

• Telephone – 01303 278137
• Email – craig.buggins@buckinghamcovers.com
• Post – Buckingham Covers, Warren House, Shearway Road, Folkestone, Kent, CT19 4BF