What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

What does ISWSC mean by small size? @amccleaf1

Over the last several days I've been working on the S and T folders out of the mange pile of stocks sheets. Not much to report; added a few that I needed here and there. Sent quite a few off to the damaged pile destined for crafting.

Yesterday I decided to tackle the small mountain of Canada pulled from the last auction. Basic sort, added some booklets and plate blocks I needed. Trying to decide how to display those I don't have pages for. That's spiraling rapidly into rebooting how I'm storing and displaying other Canada that I don't have pages for.

So far I've found 3 different binders with bits and pieces, some with souvenir sheets, 102 cards with varieties where others have blocks and booklet panes. Thankfully I've found very little duplication across the disparate storage methods.

As with everything else. Its a work in progress.

The ISWSC small circuit has a box on the instruction sheet. Stamps that fit inside the box are considered small.
Obviously every country prints different size stamps. Cureent United States Flag stamps are considered small.
The ISWSC also has circuites for united Staes stamps, Worldwide Lage, worldwide large before 1970 and CTO stamps. They also offer other types of echanges.
It is a simple way to get new stamps for your collection and dispose of some of your duplicates.
There is the unwritten rule that you do not replace the stamps you take with common stamps like Great britain Christmas stamps for the 960's and 1970's.

@NicholasC
There were multiple creators of the early Steiner pages. The person that did many of the British Commonwealth pages added minor varieties. However some pages were the minimum and did not try to optimize pages. It may be the person was not familiar with the country and used Scott pages for reference.

I have modified many Steiner pages and if I want to collect them for Czechoslovakia I may modify a few.

The expensive albums can have dull layouts at a premium price. The advantage of a larger page was squandered.

The "T-Bar" leaves from Lindner and SAFE are pretty bland. They do have the benefits of being able to place a used copy below the mint, and to add stamps or info in the unused space to the sides.

@angore, I should have realized you would have known that. I happen to have a nice selection of the minor varieties of the early Czechoslovakia and at one time made some notes in my Scott Classic catalog that I needed to create additional pages if I wanted to mount them. Just yesterday, I realized I had some perforation varieties that aren't even listed. I don't have the catalog history or anything other than Scott for the worldwide, so I can't tell for certain what is valid. After I purchased the pages back in 2020 or so, and after having made some progress, it was then I realized that I need to compare the pages to my base catalog and use that as my guide. Anything I cannot find in the catalog, I just make a note and put into a glassine behind the album page (my pages are 1-sided and in sheet protectors).

True. But the blank versions are versatile and those of Lindner allow for an inlay that allows you to design your own pages.

Your pages are, of course, far in advance of the pre-printed efforts of the producers, NSK.

I finished identifying all the loose Czechoslovakia but I have more on pages that need to be soaked. I will look these over and see if anything new before I soak. Scott is weak on Czechoslovakia (Scott Classic listing appear identical to standard).

Not sure if this counts...

I am retiring at the end of this month. One of the people I work with made this for me. I guess I talked too much about stamp collecting.

I had an argument with AI about authentication of a stamp. Eventually AI relented.

"I had an argument with AI about authentication of a stamp. Eventually AI relented."

There are huge differences in the AI engines. I had the free version of Gemini (Google's AI) misidentify a stamp 10 times in a row, being equally confident about its errors all 10 times. It's worthless.

On the other hand, the paid version of ChatGPT ($20 a month) has made huge strides in the past year or so. I use it a lot to work on my medieval coins collection. Around the end of 2025, it admitted to me that its error rate on attributing medieval coins approached 100%.

But now, what it can do in attributing really obscure medieval coins is amazing. For a couple of decades now, I have been working on a compendium of every political entity that has ever issued a coin, from the 6th century BC to the present. It's a massive project, which I thought I would never complete before I die. But ChatGPT is now proving tremendously helpful in that project, doing really amazing work on incredibly detailed questions about the localities and rulers who issued medieval and ancient coins.