What Stamp Album(S) Do You Use?

I have probably put stamps in and out of over 50 different albums over the years including Scott Browns and Blues, Nationals, Minkus, Harris, etc. What I have seen first hand is this
1. Forget the Harris albums...too cluttered and not well organized.

2. The Scott Browns and Blues use poor quality thin paper and many stamps have the photo ink imprints on the back of the stamp....very annoying. Also, the picture quality of those albums is not the best. The same Country is separated by year into several different volumes. That means that you may have 3 or 4 volumes open at the same time when working on 1 Country. Many collectors have reshuffled all the volumes and combined each country back to back in the same volume. All this work to arrive at my favorite album...

3. My favorite and the only album that I use are the Minkus Supremes (copywrite 1959). The paper is thicker and they have many more pictures and spaces for stamps. I have never seen any ink ever come off on the back of the stamp. They are 2 post albums and I insert glassine interleaves between all pages and have expanded the 2 volume edition into 5 volumes. Their layout is better than the Scott and it is truely a joy to collect stamps now. By the way, I have worked with about 3 different copywrite versions of the Supreme but none have been as complete and well laid out as the 1959 (2-volume)version.

4. No matter what album you use, you will need to double stack stamps, especially as your collection grows.

5. My albums have alphabetic dividers and inserted pages here and there to place stamps that do not fit into the album. I have also placed all stamps with a catalogue value of $4 or higher in showguard mounts with id info beneath. This will help my wife, children, and grandchildred know " at a glance" whether a stamp is rare and valuable

6. One of my desires is to set up a spreadsheet based on Scott Catalog numbers and values and computer enter the stamp (mint or used) and have the spreadsheet total the value of the collection in real time. To my knowledge, nothing is available like that anywhere in the world. I am getting close

Hi Arnold, thanks for your input...i agree on the Scott Internationals they leave a lot to be desired..its frustrating to hit a year where they only include a couple of stamps from a certain country..years ago when I was starting to put a couple of dollars together to spend on stamps they seemed like a premier item..of course I have lived to learn differently..they are ok for an intermediate collector at best .i have 25 stamp albums of all types including 8 Internationals to 1969..but they are only a diversion when things are slow..i also have twenty some cover albums.the main topic being Guatemala cards and covers..but also any U.S. or worldwide that appeals to me !

I use stockbooks. These are divided by continent and thus have a large number of them, namely 32 and they are going up because of the large number of collections being merged into my existing collection.

1 X All American album and now combined with a Scott Minuteman album
3 X Liberty albums = 1 for the overflow 1 for the plate blocks and 1 for the revenues or BOB's,
1 X Stanley and Gibbons for British stamps
2 X Severn Seas albums for my Aussie stamps
6 X Lighthouse stock books
4 X 2 and 3 ring binders for my Precancels
17 X 3 ring binders for my WW FDC/FFC.
and 4 X Specialty albums (one of a kind)
so as you can see I'm still a budding collector.

Stockbooks would work..but the initial layout would be considerable I would probably collect 2/3 of the stamp issuing countries !!

i just buy supersafe stockbooks

I wish I had started using stockbooks 10 years ago..i would color code them different areas ..one color for British Commonwealth, one for Latin America etc etc;

Thats what I do, but it really depends on what type of stockbook colours your local dealer has. Mine tend to be random so I use a label maker to mark the stockbooks.

I should label my albums if I had any sense..it can get hectic grabbing them at times !!

That's a good idea Phil as I tend to forget what's in what stock book,3 of the 6 stock books are all the same colour.

I should also add that I decided to collect pre 1960 only because of the practicality of ever nearing a complete collection. Plus.... I really enjoy hunting "antique" stamps where a watermark or perforation could swing the value of a stamp by $100's. Often, an original collector did not know about this and just inserted a stamp to match a picture. Up to around 1960 I have been told that 100,000 stamps had been issued. Today in 2010 the total stamps issued are over 2 million. I did not think I could ever make a dent in a collection requiring close to 2 million stamps and could not afford to do so. By the way I do try to collect in speciality albums of a country I have visited.

Welcome to Stamp Community Forum, Arnold!

Thanks for your post on your experience with the various types of albums. That kind of info is extremely useful for both advanced and beginning collectors! I'm still learning regarding what works and doesn't work well for my collection -- so my collection is almost always in transition.



Do you have a reference for that? I would think the number for legitimate postage stamps is closer to 300K-400K. The figure 2M would work out to over 10K stamps for every current stamp-issuing country. The only country that comes close that is Russia, and also a couple of small countries that specialized in churning out topical stamps.

It is true that there are far more stamps issued after 1960 than before. Right now, I also focus primarily on pre-1955 stamps. However, a "near-completion" collection of pre-1960 stamps would cost a LOT more than a "near-completion" collection of post-1960 stamps. While the face value of modern stamps is higher than for older stamps, the great majority of modern stamps do not carry a premium.

If you look at the catalogs, pick the 10 most expensive pre-1940 stamps, and you will often find those 10 exceed the catalog value of all the post-1940 stamps combined.

Just my thoughts.

Regarding the albums I use:
-- Scott Internationals for 1840-1955 in 6 binders, although I am in the process of switching the pre-1940 to stockbooks as there are simply too many stamps (even common ones) that do not have a spot.
-- switching to Steiner pages for post-1955.
-- a dozen or so hingeless country albums (mostly Lighthouse) for some countries which I have a good showing of modern mint stamps; these include US, Canada, Great Britain, Guernsey, Liechtenstein, Finland, UN, Mexico...
-- a dozen or so non-hingeless country albums (Australia and area, US specialty albums, US Trust Territories...
-- the rest of the stuff is temporarily in about 30+ large stockbooks, a few thousand Vario pages, about a dozen mint sheet albums, and lots and lots of boxes/bins as well as all over my desk and floor

KHJ I know where you are coming from..Good Luck to us !!

another word of wisdom from K.

K didnt I tell you I would releive you of your problems just send me 10 cents for every stamp you send me and pretty soon your house will be spotless and please make sure they are pre 1955 mint we dont want to waste space thats $1000 a square feet do we ? :)

I would, spock1k, but I'm having trouble getting into the room to get stamps out of the room...

k