Booklets - How To Display?

I am looking for ideas and opinions here and all thoughts are welcome.

The problem is this. What is the best way to display booklets in a regular collection or album? They are not something that I specifically collect but they are always cropping up in collections or lots that I purchase. The magpie instincts kick in and I always keep them.

The first type, and these are almost always modern, are booklets where there is a single sheet, most often with selvedge, and this is most often stuck inside the card cover of the booklet. The only problem is that size of the entire booklet often creates difficulty in conforming to a standard page.

I usually use photo corners, often in combination with a sleeve for the page.




The second type is a bit more problematic. This is a booklet where several sheets are stapled or sewn into a cover. Sometimes double sided advertising pages are included.

I often "explode" the booklet and take it apart though I am usually loathe to do anything that tampers with condition but it's the only way I can think of to display the thing.







Occasionally, as with this Falklands Booklet, I have a duplicate so I can display both.




How do you solve the display problem? Care to share your solutions with us?

I can sympathize. I haven't found a perfect solution for the stapled booklets, but here's what I've done.

I very carefully exploded the booklet and scanned all the panes.









This allowed me to at least display all the panes in my electronic collection. For the actual album pages, I carefully reassembled the booklet, then designed a page with photos of the stamp panes surrounding a hingeless mount to hold the booklet. (This photo is of a different booklet, but I did them all the same)



Unfortunately, it doesn't allow me to display the ads, but I was determined to store the booklet in its assembled state, and there simply wasn't room on the page for all the panes.

The single-sheet booklets I extend flat and store in the oversized clear acetate pages with pockets visible from both sides. I don't have an elegant solution for the multi-page booklets, but I'm always loath to explode them.

Very nice.

A couple ideas, which might not fit at all with your overall design aesthetic. You could print the ads on the back side of the facing page (assuming you are generally a one-sided-page kind of guy. Or you could print the ads on a clear interleaving, superimposing them on the stamp panes.

Both of those might only detract from the clean page you now have.

I feel that it depends entirely on what kind of collection you are looking to build. If you are thinking of it as an 'investment' then you should do nothing at all to the booklet, not even opening it up to look!

My personal collecting strategy is that it is my hobby and I don't expect it will make me rich. If I buy a booklet I buy it for the stamps in it (not for the often quite ugly cover) so I explode it completely and display it in my album so that I can see every single stamp.

I really find annoying sellers that just display the cover of a booklet, I often wonder if there are any stamps in it and if maybe they are not damaged in some way (eg badly foxed) hence I only buy booklets from dealers where I can open one up and see the things I am buying the booklet for.

Good suggestions all. I had never thought of scanning and re-assembling but that would work nicely with stapled if not stitched booklets.

The Kaiser yacht booklets look great displayed that way and I must say that I do like the ads. Gesundheit Cigars no less! My Dad was a cigar smoker and I spent many hours of my childhood heading off on a camping trip and spending hours in a closed car filled and wreathed with very pungent White Owl cigar smoke. How did we ever survive?

I digress. There are some ideas there that have to be experimented with. And I do agree that this is a visual collecting field so being given something that I cannot look at and share really doesn't make much sense at all. I am not basing my collecting interests on investment.

I display booklets as they come from the Post Office. So it really depends on which country and what kind of booklet is issued.

I used to buy two copies of each Prestige Booklet that I wanted but that became too expensive. So now I keep them whole but still have panes from earlier issues.

Londonbus1