A postman spent a lifetime amassing one of the world's biggest stamp collections to fund his retirement - only to pass away before he could sell them.
Alan Roy spent 70 years painstakingly peeling off more than two million stamps from letters sent to him from across the world.
The giant collection could now net his family tens of thousands of pounds at auction - or be sold for just a few thousand.
Mr Roy, who died earlier this year aged 76, kept every stamp sent to him over 70 years - from the everyday stamps used Britain to those sent in from across the world.
Auctioneer Gemma Elliot with boxes of stamps collected from all over the world by quiet postman Alan Roy over 70 years
He even amassed hundreds of the same stamps, meticulously grouping them together.
One expert noted that Mr Roy had gone for 'quantity over quality' as he amassed one of the world's largest single collections.
It includes around one million stamps from Britain, 500,000 from Ireland, 400,000 from the rest of the world and 50,000 Christmas-themed stamps. His one-man collection is so vast that it fills up 40 packing crates.
There are stamps from all over the globe and marking numerous historical events such as Olympic Games and World Cups.
They will be sold a series of auctions because the collection is so extensive that the sheer number would flood the market and cause stamp prices to plummet.
To gather the stamps, Mr Roy would involve his whole family in an industrial-scale operation. They would soak thousands of the envelopes in water and carefully lift off the stamps with tweezers.
Stamps would then be dried in meticulous lines on kitchen cooling trays that snaked around the family's two-bed flat.
Postman Alan Roy, pictured with his daughter Janette, now 50
Hugh Jeffries, editor of the stamp magazine Gibbons Stamp Monthly, said: 'It may well be one of the biggest collections, certainly by an individual.
'It is very uncommon to collect stamps in this manner. He has obviously gone for quantity over the individual rarity of stamps.
'But having done it that way, there is a very good chance of there being a few hidden gems in there. It will be a bit of a gamble for the dealers who buy them but it could quite easily pay off.'
Since Mr Roy's recent death his long-suffering family have decided to sell the colossal collection, saying they never want to see another stamp again.
Mr Roy's daughter Janette Dorrell, 50, from Poole, Dorset, said her late father's hobby was the bane of her childhood.
She said: 'You could say that I never want to see another stamp ever again.
'Dad started when he was very young, long before he became a postman, and it just grew and grew, it was relentless.
'I grew up surrounded by stamps. He used to get sacks and sacks of used envelopes delivered to the flat from various contacts from around the world and he used my old baby bath to peel them off.
'We had to put the bits of paper with the stamps on in the warm water and leave them for 20 minutes and let them detach.
'We then used tweezers to hook out each stamp very, very carefully and put them in rows on blotting paper placed on kitchen cooling trays and left them on the lounge floor to dry.
'There would be row after row of these trays and we had to be very careful where we trod or when we opened the door.
'The stamps were put in bundles of 100 and then packs of 1,000. He was very meticulous and labelled them ready for sale.
'As soon as I moved out and married when I was 21 he filled my old room up with his stamps.
'When I left my mother took over as the main helper but he often roped in my two twin daughters to help.
'He was going to sell them after he retired but he didn't get round to it and died.'
She added: 'It is a huge emotional thing as well as they are so many memories of my father attached to these stamps.'
The stockpile is so great that it would take thousands of man-hours to work through the collection and find the most valuable collectors items.
Auctioneer David Elliott said he had been unable to put a true value on them because it had been impossible to wade through the collection and catalogue them.
He told the MailOnline it was impossible to get a true idea of how much they could fetch because the value was 'in the eye of the beholder'.
'It would be simply impossible to go through them all and catalogue them, it would take another 70 years, but we are going through to try and break them into batches such as a collection of Christmas stamps.
'This is not the most valuable collection we have ever found but it is the most vast.
'And it's simply the effort that went into the preparation; soaking every stamp off. This just consumed his life. He spent his whole life dedicated to this.
'We expect to sell them to large stamp dealers who will have the resources to finish Mr Roy's work and organise them or people who want to start a business with them.'
He added: 'Mr Roy was trying to sort them and catalogue them so he could sell them in little packs but he sadly died before he could finish it.
'It's a colossal amount of stamps. I've never seen anything like it.'
The first auction takes place at Elliotts of Wimborne, Dorset, on November 28.
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