Complete Albums?

here is my curiousity getting the best of me its 5:15am and look where im at LOL ok what is a complete album consist of? I have lots of albums and want to know if I should keep them the way they are or re-do it my way.can anybody show me or tell me if there is a certain way suggestions PLEASE

Tina....

How you store or arrange YOUR collection is completely up to you. There is no wrong way to collect. Whether you use hinges or mounts, standard albums or homemade makes no difference.....it is YOUR collection.

My only real rule would be.....don't use any tape.

Complete is in the eye of the beholder. There is one group out there that is collecting by type. instead of every variety of ervey design they would be complete with just one of every design and not worry about perfs, watermarks, etc. others don't consider a set complete unless it includes every color variation lested for every variety. When you feel you are done with a set then it is complete!

Richard

Tina, there are several discussions on albums that might help you - type "album" in the search feature and have it search just the topic block rather than the whole message.

Charles

Tina, do it your way. You only have to please yourself. And there is no law that says you can't change something and start over if you want to.

I prefer stockbooks, because I reorganize constantly

The way I do it with the stamps I collect more "in-depth" is, I sort them by catalog number, which looks like this:

In this case, no album is ever complete. Every nice cancel is another addition to the collection, so there are literally billions of stamps out there to collect

Other areas, where I'm not interested in color variants and such, I only keep one of each and arrange them by sets, which saves a lot of space and then looks like this:

In this case I consider the album as complete, the moment I have every stamp that's in the catalog once.

But as said before, it's up to you how you like it.
I know people who don't sort their stamps at all, they just hinge them on pages the order they receive them.
I like to easiely find certain stamps and "get rid" of doubles I don't need, so I arrange them by catalog number.



I would say re-do them your way. But then again, I don't know the "history" of the albums. I have one stockbook I got from my grandfather (the chess one, for those who remember) that I left the way it was and I'm not going to change it.
If I receive stockbooks or albums maybe from ebay or similar, I don't hesitate to rearrange them. I don't have any personal connection to them - but I want to "integrate" them in my collection and to do so, I have to re-do them my way.

I have a printed album for my US and a blank for my Great Britain. I must admit that I like the blank better. It is far easier to allow for near duplicates and color varieties. I also have a couple of blank pages on which I have mounted stamps I like no matter the source.

A Shanghai overprint, the 1898 Canada Xmas issue, US parcel post and a couple of modern US high values, just to name a few.

But a completed printed album page is very attractive, too.

Just a matter of how anyone wants to "do it".

Hi Tina,

If the albums you are talking about are the storebought kind with pictures or spaces for each stamp, I'd say to rework them how you like. As an example, I have a USA Liberty Album. It came with pages for most of the main varieties of the USA stamps, then in the back it had pages for the BOB (I get to use this term with you now, neat) stuff, then it had pages for Confederate stamps, then it had a whole section for United Nations stamps. Well, I'm never gonna afford Confederate stamps so I removed those pages from the album and I'm not interested in United Nations stamps (in a USA album anyway) so I removed those pages too. There were also some of the BOB pages that I wasn't interested in, like newspaper stamps and documentary stamps, so out those went too. The point for me was to reduce the album to just what I was going to collect. I'm sure I kept those removed pages somewhere with the idea that if I ever wanted to add them back in I could.

Here's another thing I do for my USA stuff... For recent years, I use free USA pages from a couple different sources. I like to collect stamps from the multiple design sheets (like from the Comic book Heroes) by collecting a mint sheet from the post office, but then I also like to collect used singles of each one of the stamps in that muliple design sheet too. I use free USA pages from one source that has all the stamps from the USA for each year, but it doesn't have pages for the individual stamps of multiple design sheets. It will just have one page for you to put in the whole sheet. I have to get other pages for the individual stamps from another free USA pages source. So I mix and match.
KInd Regards,

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :)

Dave N.
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Hey Tina

Whatever you decide to do is really up to you. I'm not going to obsess about getting every stamp from every country but on the other hand I'm going to have fun trying. I print my own albums because I would rather spend money on stamps. So far it's worked out great. My album count has risen from 3 to 8 and it only cost me about $140.00.

Some people like stock books because they can rearrange more easily. I'm not looking for varieties or the perfect stamp so as soon as I find a good used copy in it goes and stays.

thank you everybody for your input oldtriguy1960 I tried to download a site that gives you free album pages its on one of dave giles topics but as you very well know how computer illiterate I am thats as far as I could get it stumped me once again LOL