What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

For a while, I had a set of Scott albums for South America. It was here, perhaps, that its separation of airmail issues created maximum irritation. Stamps from one set, scores of pages apart. Ditto Steiner, with worse layout.

GeoffHa ---Understand your frustration ,I have that in reverse when moving stamps from S.G. or Minkus album pages .

I grew up with that separation, to me it is normal .
The reason for that goes back over 100 years ago when airmail stamps here had their own albums and a separate catalogs . In Chicago,I attended a few meetings at the Jack Knight Stamp Club which most members only collected airmail stamps .

Speaking of transitioning between various formats in my case page sorting. I'm finally finishing up moving into my new (to me) Nationals. It was more complicated then it needed to be because I had pulled all definitive pages sorted by coil, booklet, self adhesive into a different binder.

I fought if I actually liked it that way or not so for now I left the new albums alone with what I guess is the factory sorting.

Its weird abandoning my original albums since I've been toting them around for roughly 40 years!
Don't get me wrong I'm glad I made the change; the old pages were hand me downs of hand me downs with some staining, thinning from mount damage and well worn. And I'm loving the 3 ring format. Probably a little too much....Its so easy just to pop out a page, flip back and forth between years..... What can I say.. I'm a slow adopter lol

For my U.S. collection having airmail at the "back of the book" is okay because those stamps are distinct from regular postage. I'm redoing my Colombian collection and using LibreOffice to edit the Steiner pages, (1) to format them to the 9" x 12" page size of Harris Citation albums (I print on 11" x 17" ledger paper and trim it down), and (2) to organize them .by year of issue rather than postage type. When a stamp design is used for both a regular and airmail issue they can stay together.

Last Friday, October 16, I drove from eastern Washington to the SEAPEX Bourse in the Seattle area, my first time there. I had a good time and found useful material, but I think the PIPEX show in Portland, Oregon is a better trip. Part of that is because I don't have to drive, I take Amtrak from Pasco to Portland, walk 2 blocks, and then take the light rail out to the Clackamas Town Center station. It's a 1/4 mile walk to the show hotel, but I've been told they will send their courtesy van if you call. It has exhibits, more dealers, and there are lots of nice restaurants to walk to.

Last Friday was October 9 here in the Heartland.

Good catch olddutch2. Thought I lost a week somewhere.

Still plugging away at US, it's become painfully obvious I need to (and already have) for the most part radically overhaul my acquisition strategy.

I've spent numerous hours organizing and sorting US from what seems like 30 different sources in every format you can think of into a useful process in order to put in book. So I spend the time, do my due diligence and the result is I put about 20 to 30 stamps in the book and the rest gets stored away as dupes.

Moving forward no more US that I don't need!!! Most of the stuff comes along for the ride with box lots, red boxes and what not but I need to do better. To that end I'm compiling a US need/want list and will work on eliminating the hitchhikers.

As if I needed any reinforcement to help focus my acquisition strategy. Right after I finished up my work on US today I find another 40 ish stock pages over filled with US. Mint, used covering the earlies into the 20teen range. I know its a true first world problem. I vaguely remember scanning the stuff when it arrived thinking yeah it needs gone through.

Unless something changes overnight I'm ready to work on something else and circle back to the US at a later date.

Still going through a box full of glassines with stamps. Many are butterflies so they were a topical collector. For, countries I do collect and for the areas I do collect most are stamps I already have.

I am also learning Affinity software. The latest versions merge all prior products (Publisher, Photo, and Designer) into one product. It is overkill for basic image editing but a good start. Since Microsoft has ended support for their Publisher this can do that but a lot more. It has 3 studios - Vector, Pixel, and Layout.

Yesterday I took a mangy pile of stocksheets alphabetized them and put each stack into a folder based on first letter.

Today I've been working on a mini hoard of Sweden. Broke out the earlies and have been finding a few to put in my book.

Went through a nice, but messy album of Chinese stamps, mostly from the 1950's. Found a lot to fill empty places in my collection (some Chinese stamps can be very hard to find used, even when the stamp is very common). And dug up some mint ones that are worth a few dollars. Rewarding, and I like sorting out a mess.

I am now going through a bunch of Czechoslovakia. The country was a prolific stamp issuer but most have some historical basis rather than topicals. Most modern ones are CTOs but at least the cancels are light so not glaring as some countries.

I looked at the Steiner pages and whomever did the layout was lazy. There are no spaces provided for all the early perforation varieties.

Authenticated one of the original Ukraine sheets of Russia go. I used a digital microscope to view x16 on my PC to verify the crispness of the selvage text and uniform pattern of color dots used in the design.



Next to plain white paper under UV it is evident that the paper used for the stamp is "dead" while the test paper glows. Soon s sheet of "W" rate will show up and I can authenticat it as well. Only 500k of each were printed and then subsequently heavily forged on home printers.

@angore, I believe the purpose of the Steiner pages was to cover all the major numbers in the Scott catalog. It's easy enough to modify or add pages to add spaces the missing minor varieties. That said, Steiner was not consistent with what was selected for coverage since minor varieties are accounted for in many countries.

This weekend am going through my ISWSC circuit of small size. There are 200 in each circuit, so it can take a while, depending on the contents. I do: first pass - remove anything I obviously already have and any damaged ones, then sort by country, then put onto a Vario page. After that, I get out the catalog and the albums and go through everything to see if I have it or make a list to catalog later. Finally, do a count of what I kept and go through the duplicate stash and replace that number and a few more before passing it on. I got a second circuit while working on this one, so it needs my focus so I can get to the next one and not delay the remaining circuit members their next exciting mailing. Then I print any pages I need, mount the 'new' ones and update my inventory list. I am still surprised at how many WW small size I am still missing after all these years. Often just common ones, but I do check the details and sometimes am surprised by one with a little higher CV.