Is It Only Crystal Mounts?

I remember joining this forum a couple of years ago and having my socks blown off when I started to read that Crystal Mounts were not good for your stamps........

As I've said in a few other threads, I've hundreds of stamps in Crystal Mounts that have been PROPERLY STORED and there is absolutely zero (0) evidence that anything is happening to them.

On the other hand, look at the two stamps below. I got these about four months ago as "gifts" when I bought some stamps from a seller. They were sitting in my desk drawer and it was today I decided to take a look at them. There was about a dozen in the "gift" group and they were all in these black "split" mounts. But the two obviously have a problem.

I think this is all about storage.

Crystal Mounts get a bad name because they were literally the first ones and people leave stamp collecting and put their albums in the bottom of a basement or next to the garage door in 1982.

Then they come back in 2010 and expect to find pristine stamps.


Has anyone taken the time machine to 2050 to see how ShowGard or other mounts are showing up after having spent 20 years in a basement?

I can't speak for how any of these specific supplies may age over time. I do agree that proper storage makes a great difference in how the stamps (and stamp mounts) age over time. However, I share some comments based on my experiences:

[1] As a new stamp collector in the 1970's and 1980's, I used to use Crystal Mounts myself. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one's position) I never had stamps of that much value then that would have broke the bank if damage did come to them because of the mount. I seem to recall they were a lot "cheaper" than the competition (i.e. Showgard) which is why many of us used them, I'm sure. Today, I have heard stories that you can't even remove the Crystal mount from an album without damaging the album page in the process.

[2] I have an old 1900-era stamp album that has a few stamps left in it. They are in Crystal-type mounts (although I doubt they were that brand.) Anyway, what gets me is that the former collector having this album used scotch tape (!) to "seal the mount" on the open ends, making it nearly impossible to remove the stamps. Today, the only way I can remove those stamps is to very carefully use an X-acto knife to cut the scotch tape without damaging the stamp in the process. A very tedious job at best and in some cases the scotch tape slightly damaged the stamp anyway.

[3] Then there's the issue of maintaining collections in older albums of any kind (even with the better mounts) as many are out there before acid-free paper was introduced and the current mindset is to remove and remount them into the newer acid-free paper albums.

[4] Postal authorities are of no help, either. I just came across a couple of postcards I purchased a few years ago from the USPS encased in a plastic shrink wrap and a cardboard backing, with the statement "not for philatelic archiving" and I previously posted a comment about some 1960 UN Year Set Folders that had the stamps enclosed in a glassine envelope but they used a thin piece of cellophane tape of the day to attach them to the folder. In 2010, the tape browned and stained both the folders and glassines.

The bottom line is that today's technology has surpassed the stamp collecting community of old and unless one aggressively converts their collection to the latest technological advances (i.e. better mounts and archival quality paper) there's always a risk of whether or not it will stand the test of time.

Thanks for letting me vent some of my opinions on this issue.

It's not just stamp collecting!

Why does the #1 card of each year in vintage sports card collecting garner a higher value? Because in the day, people stored them by wrapping rubber bands around them - thus the #1 card was usually damaged.

I won't even mention the ones that were used for various games or in bicycle spokes.

Thanks for the scans. nice to see.

Nice read wt1 !