The Citation Stamp Album

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I hear Harris is out of business now.

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Whatever Happened To World-Wide Stamp Albums?

If you began collecting stamps during the 1950's and 1960's as I did, you probably remember the selection of world-wide albums you had for housing your collection.

Scott, Minkus, Harris, and Grossman all offered several albums in different sizes to help you collect and contain a world full of stamps. And if you happen to come across an ad for any of them in the back of some old album, now, they were relatively cheap.

Communist countries were doing it for a long time, but other nations who saw revenue possibilities in the hobby began to catch on to the fact that if you issued it, collectors would come and buy. For tiny countries like Monaco and San Marino, issuing stamps were among their leading industries.

While all this was great news for topical collectors, with mostly colorful, thematic stamps being issued, the glut of material was hurting other hobbyists who referred to the plethora of colorful issues as "wallpaper," especially once the "dunes" and "shiekdoms" of the former Trucial States made the scene. Collectors began to specialize more and more or drop out of the hobby altogether, since keeping up with everything could be dizzying as well as expensive.

As an example, a Scott International Album that could at one time hold a good, representative collection of stamps issued within the course of 100 years of philately, could no longer contain the stamps issued over the course of a couple of years! Stamps were not issued to carry the mail but as revenue enhancers marketed by philatelic agencies to eager, or maybe not-so-eager collectors.

Eventually, publishers such as Scott, Minkus and Harris hit the skids with most of the pieces, including what's left of the philatelic press, pretty much being held together by one company, Amos, a company I never even heard of during the philatelic heyday.

Now, if you want a world-wide album, a new one that is, you are pretty much limited to the Harris Statesman Deluxe, or possibly one of the albums published by Canadian Wholesalers, such as the Phoenix Album.

Some collectors turn to auctions where occasionally unused or little used copies of the discontinued larger albums like the Minkus Master Global Album or the Harris Citation Album can be found.

This isn't to knock the smaller Statesman Deluxe Album that is currently carried by most stamp hobby suppliers, since it probably is the best place for anyone new to stamp collecting to start. It's main drawback, besides being limited in scope and size is that with all the blank space it contains, it leaves too much to the imagination. Not that that's all bad, since it is ideally suited to the inexperienced beginner who still doesn't know where he will take the hobby or how long he will continue collecting, and with so much room for stamps without illustrations give him a place to mount just about anything he might acquire.

On the other hand, the Statesman Deluxe Album does have room to hold some 25,000 stamps and in all the years it has been published, most collectors who owned it have never put more than a few hundred or maybe a few thousand stamps into one of them. Yet filling one would be a challenge for any collector!