Organizing And Mounting Stamps

I have a frustration with organizing and mounting stamps. What I have accumulated are many stamps from around the world. Some in sets and many individual issues. Most of the stamps that I collect are the common variety, not the expensive, deep pocket items. Is there a album mounting scheme that one can use and not be a slave to the catalogs or published albums? I do use blank pages. I in no way expect to complete any country or year sets. I do like to collect worldwide. I have always approached stamp collecting from the point of view of sampling at a pot-luck supper, a little from here and a little from there and eventually you have a full plate. Using this analogy, if I collect this way I will have a cross section of stamps from around the world, which would satisfy my curiosity. How might you mount stamps collected in this fashion? Thanks for any suggestions that are forth coming.
sandflea681

Hi Joel! Welcome to the club. Since you are using blank pages, I would suggest separating them by country and then subcategorize by year issued. It is your collection and that is the beauty of it you can place them howver you want. Another way to do it is by using loose stock pages or a stock book. You could also place them by topic instead of country or year. I hope this helps.

Welcome Joel.

I don't know how big you want to grow your collection. But if you pick up an album such as a Harris Statesman Deluxe that is pretty open ended, not showing years and having both blank spaces and illustrations, you will get some organization and yet be free to place your stamps wherever you want. Just consider the illustrations to be suggestions and don't be afraid of covering them with another stamp. No one will know, and even you will forget if it's just a blank space or an illustration underneath. Since you are not building an in depth, specialized collection but collecting what you like in an album that is far from formal, it really doesn't matter. Just have fun.

Thank you for both responses. I can use both ideas. Stamperdude,if I wanted to use blank pages as you suggest along the idea of topics, what would be your suggestions on how to develop or arrange a country selection along a topical basis? Thanks again.
Joel

I just use binders and blank pages which gives me total freedom. Here is a link for blank pages you can print.

http://www.stampalbums.com/blank_pages.asp

Great ideas from the folks above! Since you like using blank pages and want to collect pot-luck, you might consider collecting by topic. Just a thought.

Another route you could take is to use www.stampalbums.com. This guy charges $20 per year and publishes .pdf files of stamp albums from around the world. You can pick and choose which pages you want and print those pages only.

I use him exclusively now. I print my country collections on acid free paper, mount them with Showgard mounts and slide each page into an acid free document protector. Obviously, it can get as pricey or inexpensive as you want, but the end result is a very sharp looking custom album.

I subscribe to that site and it's wonderful.


I finally got my scanner and printer to work. Thanks to Linux and Ubunto (I think that's spelled right). I'll post pictures of my first attempt on the weekend.

Dianne

I would highly recommend outlaw13 suggestion for stamp albums. I have a couple of sets of hingeless albums well up in the hundreds of dollar range and the outcome of printing your own are very close for the cost of subscription and about 10 dollars of a ream of paper. Also, he does accept stamps for payment for subscription. Hope he can use all those 3 cent issues I sent.

Joel,
As for arrangement, take a page and start placing your stamps on them in until they look right to you. You could do standard rows and columns, geometric shapes, odd spacing, etc. It also depends on the size of the stamps, if they are a sheet, strips, blocks, etc. I would do countries alphabetically for ease of finding. Each person has their own collecting quirks, trial and error, just see what works best for you.

Using blank pages can be very rewarding and can progress as you desire even though they can be quite labor intensive. Word processing softeware can be very helpful and useful for design and neatness with Microsoft Office being pretty much the gold standard. It has a major drawback in that it it very pricey but there is a legal free clone available at openoffice.org. There is also a very handy design product that you may want to consider called AlbumGen if you don't mind spending a modest sum.

Geeze, I'm old fashioned. I just used PayPal!

I use the pages for my Guatemala and U.S. also, and I really like them. For $20 you can't find a better product.

I have to say, that the pot pouri of FDC's, event covers and pictorial cancellations and other postmark items that I have, work well in the dating scheme expressed above. Other than postmarks, covers et al.. for a topic presentation of the American Revolution, this puts an accumulation into a logical order in an album. Sometimes you can't see the trees for the forest. The frustration I originally expressed has gone. Thanks for the suggestions.
Joel

stampalbums.com is a great place to get pages. They have everything you can think of there. The price is good too.

Welcome to the forum

I am using several of these ideas. I have always liked Harris albums. The Liberty album was my first album for US stamps. I like the Statesman album because it has illustrations which help to organize the illustrated and the non-illustrated stamps at least chronologically. It takes some of the tedium out of the catalogs. HOwever, I use blank pages in conjunction with the illustrated pages depending on a particular set of stamps. Fortunately, Harris has quadrilled pages for their albums and standard blank pages can be adapted as well. The above suggestions have greatly taken the bug-a-boo out of mounting and simplified cataloging. I do like to collect world wide. It is an interesting adventure. I like packets of stamps, box lots and trading when it becomes available to me on this site. I really appreciate the input! Thank you.
Joel