Mounting Self Adhesives

I absolutely hate soaking the new self adhesive stamps and I actually enjoy close trimming them. My question is, is there any reason not to use hinges on self adhesives that have been trimmed and still have the envelope paper on the back. I know they would be heavier for the hinge.

I can think of no reason. It's what I do.

A hinge should only affect the condition of a Mint stamp. Even hinging a used (but soaked off the paper stamp) really shouldn't affect the value or condition, so hinging the paper still attached to a self-adhesive should be just fine.

Kurt

No reason at all. The backing paper would take the hinge "damage" and some future owner who would want the stamp "unhinged" could always soak off the stamp from the backing paper at a later date.

Mint self-adhesive stamps seems to be where the argument comes in, as hinges mounted to the backing paper of mint stamps are considered less desirable by some. Others (myself included) don't view it to be that much of a problem, as the "stamp" isn't injured by the hinge, only the backing paper.

In reality, most modern self-adhesive stamps will never be worth much more than face value, so one has to consider the cost of oversized stamp mounts versus the low cost of stamp hinges, and what the owner of an "album" wants the end result to look like (i.e. all stamps in mounts or all stamps hinged).

The bottom line is that the collection is yours, so do what pleases you. As mentioned above, the value factor isn't really an issue with most modern stamps and for those that are considered "valuable" you can always use stamp mounts solely for them or even Vario pages to store those specimens.

It's what I do too. I hate the self adhesives and would never buy any for collection purposes. Biggest mistake the post office ever made was going to them. That's the year where I stop collecting.