Soaking

You have bought some kiloware or have an accumulation of stamps on paper. Now what? Rather than dump all of into a bucket to remove the backing paper, you need to do some sorting and preparation first.

Are there stamps from before the 1940s? There may be stamps on purposely fugitive ink. Set those aside for floating.

There are likely self-adhesive stamps in modern kiloware. Stamp with slits intentionally cut in the middle are designed to fall apart when soaked. Otherwise, there are some self-adhesives that will not release from envelope paper. So, set these aside. See: Self-adhesive stamp processing. Then, are there cancels that you might want to keep or might be tradeable? Set those aside.

Then, sort out anything on colored paper. Red is often fugitive, as is found on Christmas card envelopes and airmail envelopes. Orange and yellow orange paper for large-size mailing envelopes can also be fugitive. Set all those aside for floating.

If there is a lot of duplication, you may not want or need to soak everything. You may not want to keep stamps with significant faults, either. So, remove what you want to keep and set the rest aside, perhaps in a clear freezer bag. Good practice is to sort again after going through the first time – "measure twice, cut once".

Soaking
You will need:
 * a good sized container, enough to hold at least three times the amount of water over stamps on paper.
 * lots of papers or paper towels for drying processed stamps, or a drying book. The latter is extremely useful buying more than one is recommended.
 * very cool or cold clean tap water.





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