Phils Stamp Room

My issue with the Stiener albums is the size! If only they would compress them, by putting twice the amount of stamps on each page!

Floortrader....you mention two of my favorite people..first Janet Klug..i have met her at State College and a few APS shows..one of the nicest people...a real genuine person...and I trust brother Bill Gross to allocate some of my savings !!

PHILB-----Agree with you about both people .
JOE1225 and BOBGGGG -------- Im hopeing one of you start a seperate link here for all the people who use STEINER PAGES,its the future of stamp collecting ,im sure both of you have valueable tips on how you both use the Pages on your computer .I downloaded a few countries and printed the pages and found a few minor errors on FINLAND. But if we all had a website that talked about types of paper and which printers work best with heavy paper and which paper is best for pages and all kinds of other clues to makeing decent albums it will be a education and help those thinking about it, a comfortable place to talk about the software
Im sure Steiner would pop in and listen and make helpful clues to what is possible with the software that im not seeing and others could use also .

Here is my collection. The Asia section is in disorder right now as I am documenting it, but Africa and the Middle East/Central Asia is completed. Once I start documenting Europe, North America, South America and Central America I'll change their labels as well. This doesn't include the items in boxes that I have yet to organize. It seems that the shelves are bowing as well. Any recommendation to fix that?

Nice to see another collection housed in stockbooks :)

I've been thinking about adding some sort of custom support piece(s) below the shelves I'm having problems. It should be pretty low cost and easy to implement (just a proper piece of timber/lumber, and some drilling).

I had this problem early on, as I have a LOT of non-philatelic books and periodicals. Eventually, I had to spend the extra money and purchase bookshelves with minimum 1 to 1.25 inch thickness. Shelves with a long 1" thick support attached perpendicularly beneath the front of the shelf also helps, as well as remembering to nail the backing board along the length of the shelves (not just along the top/sides of the bookcase; every little bit of support helps, and don't underestimate how the backing board helps hold things in place).

I still use many of my older thin shelf bookcases from 2 decades ago. The fight the "bowing" problem, I simply flip the shelf every year. Of course, you can't really do that if you have nailed the backing board (***I no longer do this for the thin shelves so that I can flip them every year***).

A couple of your thin shelves may be "nailed" fixed at the sides, you can't flip those -- but, you will notice those shelves don't bow as much as the edges are being pulled/held by the sides instead of just sitting on pegs (like I said, every little bit of nailing helps).

The only drawback to "flipping" is that on the cheapest thin shelves, the backside often is "unfinished", so it might look a little ugly the first time. Just tidy your albums so that they sit all the way to the front edge of the shelf, and nobody will be the wiser -- or you can temporarily put some shelving paper (don't glue/paste it fixed).

Just some ideas for you to think about.

Thanks for your help scb and khj. I'll keep in mind your ideas. It may also be due to them being cheap walmart shelves costing less than 50 dollars. Maybe its time for new ones?

I'm like Keijo - spending more on the storage than the mass of common stamps are worth. I have about 30 boxes x 1000 of 102 cards. Yikes! At least I'm ready with the red boxes, 70 of those ready to go. Although somehow I ended up with 10 of them in black - I didn't even know you could get them in black ....

Ryan

Hi Ryan, I have also been known to put minimum value stamps in 102 cards...in some cases the 102's are a better buy than glassines..i have seen dealers at shows put a stamp in a 102 card and ask 10 cents for it..not too much profit there...we all need the shelves and the book cases, supplies and whatever else goes along with our hobby !!

RYAN-------I also use 102 cards for complete sets {any value} and also for better stamps {catalog over 50 cents} Then I place them in the red boxes in scott catalog order by country with a oversize tab so when I look into the box its right were it needs to be in order.

Perhaps we are putting those stamps away for posterity..when I started cataloging them in red boxes I had hopes of trading with other collectors..i do not have enough red boxes to have a table at a stamp show and no one has come to my home to look through them..at least in the boxes they are in some sort of order...trying to sell a 50 cent stamp on the internet is labor intensive...with sets there is a possiblility...

I credit scb with my plan to place all my world wide stamps into stockbooks. Before, I had them in old Minkus pages and never seemed to have the right pages for all the stamps I had amassed. My sorting envelopes were overflowing with stamps that had nowhere to go. Since May, I have been going through each country and putting them into Lighthouse stockbooks. I have also made a list of the number of stamps I have from each country, just like scb did on his blog, and it is interesting to see where I compare with my collection. I do have my favorite countries that I plan to leave in the Steiner albums that I created. Also, I have no plans to redo my USA collection since I am using Davo albums for those stamps. I am at letter G and so far have counted 23,000 stamps. The downside has been the cost of the stockbooks.

joe1225us- I feel the same way about the Steiner pages!

Good question Philb about the Scott Internationals. I mount extra stamps on some of the many blank pages that seem to be part of these albums. Very often there will be one airmail stamp on a page with a blank page facing the stamp. If I get a whole bunch of stamps, especially true for Parts 1 and 2, I will get a blank quadrille page and put the stamps on the page and place the page roughly were it would be in the album. I do sometimes sneak a stamp or two on a page with the others if there is some room. This looks a tad messy though. Buying SI's used is definitely the way to save quite a bit of money. However the heavier paper in the newer versions of the supplements is very nice to have. I know floortrader mentioned about how albums and pages don't stand up to repeated use. I think I have changed all my binders at least once for all of my Scott International Albums.

It's humbling to hear my experiences/experiments have influenced other collectors opinions. Thank You.



Every hobby does have it's costs. A pair of new Nike's costs easily more than a box of new stockbooks. LOL

As far as I know (and have calculated), stockbooks are cheaper than any other storage method (assuming proper materials are used).