Informational Inserts In Stock Albums

I'm sure this has been discussed at some point but I wasn't able to find anything via search.

Does anyone who uses a stock album do any kind of insert with history or information about your stamps? Even some sort of a country cover page? I've been thinking about this lately and thought gathering the information would be kind of interesting. Plus when someone else looks at your album, they'll have an idea of what they are looking at.

I'm not sure I could make it look professional enough but the idea is interesting.

Any thoughts (or pictures!) would be helpful.

I personally do not bother with the descriptive pages, but some here on Stamp Collecting Forum take a great deal of time and effort in doing these sort of things. Here's one past link to a SCF thread discussing the very topic...I'm sure there are others who will chime in with their experiences, too:

http://goscf.com/t/10625

That is one thing about the old albums of yesteryear, they used to have a great deal of info on the back of each page. I have bought a few of these pages from Sandafayre and save them even when I take the stamps off the front.
Ghu-YSC.

I've added little inserts to my Hungary stock book, listing basic information such as year, perf size, watermark and Scott number. I WAS staging the stamps for eventual insertion in an album and used to the inserts so I wouldn't have to do the basic cataloging work again. I just sliced up an index card into little tabs that I inserted to the left of each set.

Hung,
Nice neat idea. you should post a photo to illustrate how you have done it.
Yuri-YSC.

My inserts are nothing to write home about. They're purely functional as notes to myself until I mount the stamps in albums and not really for display. But here's an example of the first page of the "Turul and Crown" series, which is a work in progress.

There are serveral watermarks and perforations to collection in this series. I organize stamps by year of issue, not Scott number. Actually I use Michel for central Europe (I like my air mails and semi-postals in the front of the book).

Here is page two. (I switch from blue post-it notes to white index cards at some point).

I wasn't sure you could see the tabs (to see what a mess they are - I have horrible penmanship), so here's closer view. (Wz is German abbrev. for watermark and Kz for perforation).

HungaryForStamps: You should try the shareware software "Stamp Tags" that will printout computer generated stamp sized inserts you can cut out for your Vario pages, they can be sized in numerous ways, with different fonts, etc., and they can even be sized as inserts to identify contents in glassine envelopes. The program is not very sophisticated, but I have found it quite useful for labeling stamps in stockbook pages similar to what you have posted.

Here's a previous SCF discussion about that software:

http://goscf.com/t/22840

Thanks wt1, that might come in handy someday.

BTW, when I loaded up that stock book, I basically took the quickest route to (literally) scribble the info I needed on the front and the back of the homemade tab. I never intended it to look nice. If I were to use the stock book for a permanent display, which I might, I would try to be neater.

All my collections are in stockbooks - I just can't imagine being dictated to by a printed album. I use small paper tags to identify by Gibbons number all items over a certain catalogue value, and also to add comments on points of interest, descriptions of markings on covers, and study notes etc. These days, I usually handwrite the tags, then when I'm feeling sufficiently energetic, I run through my stockbooks and print the handwritten tags out on the computer. I still have some ancient tags done on the old manual typewriter though, that I've never needed to replace.

Hun,
Your hand makes notes more personal and I prefer.
If use computer is not so treasured I am thinking.
Your stamps are much interesting.
Zee - YSC.

My album for the 1-stamp-per-country collection looks like this:






The tags mention country, catalogue number, year of issue, description of what's on the stamp.

I have been thinking about this long and hard as I plan out my collection storage (I am using vario 7s stock pages for the most part). I want things to look very good (aesthetics are important in my case)

I think I have come up with a solution. Avery Printable Business Cards!

In sheets of 10, Each card is 2" x 3.5" - My 7 row stock sheets are each about 1" tall, so, my plan is to see if I can adjust the print-template to divide each card into 4 equal parts 1" x 1.75". Then, I can print out my inserts (in my case - Years - small descriptions), and then quickly pop out each card and cut it in half each way with a scissors (which should be a fairly straight cut since it's a small cut). One package of business cards contains 120 cards, giving me 480 inserts.

So my plan is to say print a sheet of years (I could for instance print years 1900-1939 on one sheet) and then use them as I need them.

Anyway - that's the idea that is bouncing around in my head at this moment.

Here is an example of what I am thinking of doing...

As others have sScott numbers / details, I am thinking of adding a paper appendix to the back of the album with those types of details.

(That's "Georgia" font by the way. I like how it makes the numbers look old-school, almost typewriter)