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Originally Posted by steve B
Like discount postage - Lots of people saved full sheets as an "investment" but like junkwax cards, only worse. Nearly all US stamps made since the 1930's have minimal value. People would bring him stacks of sheets a relative had "collected" and he'd do a quick look through and some even quicker rough math. 100 sheets of 50, mostly 8 cent... $400 face value he'd tell them to use it as postage, but people couldn't be bothered. So he'd ask what they wanted. Nobody ever did the math, so most stacks like that were around $100 And he would buy anything similar that was under around 200.
The sheets were sold bulk to a convent near his house that needed lots of postage, at usually 20% less than face value.
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Something similar happened to Warren Buffett when he was just starting out, right after he left Graham-Newman; him and his partners bought up several thousand dollars of a blue eagle stamp that the post office was about to discontinue, only to belatedly realize they weren’t worth more than face value. They used to stockpile to mail out annual reports. They bought the stamps in the mid 1950s; the stockpile wasn’t exhausted until the early 1970s.