Tryzub Free Ukrainian Stamp Album Pages

This is nothing new. But ink is expensive and I can appreciate why you would not want to waste your money on my pages.




As I said in a previous post, it was always my intent to use Scott numbers. Scott denied me the free use of their numbers. I then offered to pay for them. They refused to even take money for the numbers. They basically said, if you want Scott numbers on album pages, you need to buy Scott albums. I also have reached out to Stanley Gibbons in the past and was refused the use of their numbers also. MICHEL was the only company that allowed me use of their numbers. I was more than willing to pay Scott and SG. They both would not take my money.




This supplement has nothing new compared to supplements for the last few years.




That is your right. It's a free country. You can spend your money any way you choose. I'm glad Steiner pages are being offered and you're able to make use of them. I started a project a while ago that I hope to someday release that will allow you to print descriptions on the back of Steiner pages, so when the album lies flat, you'll have the stamps on the right and descriptions on the left. If you're using page protectors, then you'll be able to slip descriptions in without needing to remount anything. If you see value in that project and would like to help shape it, I'd be happy to work on it with you.

And, here are the 1918 stamps mounted on the page:

The Tryzub Ukrainian Stamp Album 1920 Supplement is available now for download.

Here's a pic for your amusement:



You can download the files from my blog here:

http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=1111

Great pages! I've been working on a set of Australian pre-decimal pages based on the Stanley Gibbons catalog and Steiner template. At some point I'll have to post them to share with the community.

Someone's a bit critical today, aren't they? These Ukraine pages are excellent. Nice job. As for using up all the blue ink (smile), just set your printer to "black and white". Problem solved. Too many changes? You want changes to improve pages, don't you? Michel numbers? Who cares? Just get a Michel catalog. The entire stamp world is not ruled by Scott catalogues in case you didn't know that. Catalog numbers outside the stamp box? How in the world is that a problem? I find it helpful to not have to lift up a stamp to check its catalog number. In short, you're doing it right. Don't be put off by critics who nitpick every decision you made.

I just stumbled into this thread.

I have no gift for non-Roman alphabets and have not ever pursued philately of the Cyrillic nations, even though I'm interested in their creative arts. (Like any self-respecting liberal arts major, I spent years drenching my brain in the novels of Dostoevsky.)

These pages are great. The stamps are great. (I kinda knew that already; I was an active Postcrosser for a few years, and some of the coolest stamps I've ever seen came from Ukraine.) And the writeups are double dog dynamite great. (One nitpick, and blame the pedantry that always goes with a literature degree; in the last line of the Statute of Volodymyr Monomokh writeup, the "it's" in "it's 900th anniversary" needs no apostrophe.) It's one thing to have a page of stamps with tridents on them; to know why the tridents are there in the first place is beyond cool. Thanks!

The problem some people are having is that I went and did a bunch of pages, people printed them (which costs money. ink and paper aren't cheap) and then I went and redesigned them all.

Collecting stamps that use a non-Latin alphabet is a challenge for people in Europe and the Americas. I include pictures of every page because You are never going to patch up a title with a stamp unless you can read Cyrillic.

I have always felt that catalog number on pages are important. Since I am a natural born American, my first choice is to use Scott numbers. Scott turned me down. They wouldn't let me use them for free, and they wouldn't let license them for a fee.

Michel was choice #2 for 2 reasons:

1. Russian and Soviet stamp collectors use MICHEL
2. The website of the Ukrainian Post Office used MICHEL numbers before they came up with their own numbering scheme.

I emailed MICHEL, the mailed me a license. I signed it and sent it back and the rest is history.

Though others may disagree with me, I believe in using the numbering system most prevalent for a country. For US, I use Scott. For Ireland I use Stanley Gibbons, and for Ukraine I use MICHEL.

I've had a lot of Irish collectors tell me I should be using Hibernian. And I challenge them to find me a single eBay or bidStart listing with a Hibernian number.

I put up a zip file with what I call the "Scribus source." My pages are all designed in an open source desktop publishing app called Scribus that anyone can download for free and install. All the fonts are freely available. If you don't like something on the page, you can go edit it and save it out as a PDF.

That being said, I've been at this for a while. Editing pages can be seriously time consuming. I have a full time job, and a 12 and 14 year old I need to drive to Boy Scout meetings, school activities etc. I can't tell you how many times I thought I was done and going to go to bed and suddenly start screaming 4 letter obscenities in my head cause I forgot to make A4 size pages. When its' 11:30 at night and you just want to go to bed, adding another 15 minutes of work is really annoying.

The only reason Ukraine is technically done is because all I need to do it deal with 1918-1922 and 1992-present.

I can totally understand why someone wants to just download and print. It's far less work.

As for descriptions.....

It boggles my mind that the more expensive and album is, the less likely it is to have descriptions. Stamps are a glimpse into another countries history and culture. I want to learn about the countries I collect, and having stamp descriptions is the best way to do that.

Thank you everyone for your kind words. I do the best I can with the time that I have. It's been insane with back to school and getting into the new routine, so I haven't done much with stamps since the summer.

My wife is out at Coach Bag Bingo. My 14 year old is at a Force of Will tournament (card game like Magic The Gathering), my 12 year old is on the Xbox.

You'd think I'd be doing something stampy, but instead I'm chatting with you guys while I listen to Volbeat and Neil Diamond on headphones.

Sometimes it's good to sit there and do nothing...

My preference for a high end album is the stamps on the right page and details on the left, though I haven't actually found any... :)

Will you be adding pages for the various overprints and such issued from 1918 through 1923? The first try at loading these gave me lots of errors with missing fonts, but it looks like they will be available for download. I'm going to experiment with exporting EPS files and then importing into inDesign so I can change the border to match my pages.

The Mystic Heirloom does the stamps on the right and descriptions on the left. But that's US Only.

For the fonts, here is what you'll need:

League Gothic: https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype...eague-gothic
URW 35 fonts from Ghostscript: http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/fonts/
Liberation Fonts: https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/

If it nags you about any other fonts, let me know what they are and I'll hunt them down for you.

I originally started using Liberation Sans. But that's a clone of Arial. I find Arial to be incredibly boring, as fonts go. So I switched to Nimbus Sans L, which is a clone of Helvetica.

It appears there is a database error on my site. I have a ticket in to support. I tried to do a database repair from the control panel and it won't let me, because it wants to take the database offline.

Well, it's that time of year again.

Time to release the 2015 Tryzub Ukrainian Stamp Album Supplement.

So, here's the posy on my web site: http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=1127

Screenshot:



And for direct file download, you can click here: https://github.com/apastuszak/tryzu...ive/v1.0.zip

Kind of embarrassing when you notice 3 months later that you're missing a stamp!

Updated 2015 supplement here:

http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=1145

The page that was fixed:

I'm starting to get back in the swing of things with stamp collecting. Trying to get all the Ukraine pages updated with MICHEL numbers and release dates. PosmastersGS' excellent tool is making the job a lot easier.

Here's what I have done so far:

• 2015 supplement was updated once a UPNS member pointed out that I had some dates wrong
• 1998 re-released with with MICHEL numbers and dates of issue
• 1998 re-released with with MICHEL numbers and dates of issue

I am how using Github to host all my releases, which seems to be working geekily well for me.

As usual, you can see all the release on my website:

http://www.stamphacks.com

And you can access the releases direction from github at:

https://github.com/apastuszak/tryzu...bum/releases

And... a screenshot of 1999:

And 2000 is done. Updated with MICHEL Catalog numbers and dates of issue:

Blog post here: http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=1164

Download link: https://github.com/apastuszak/tryzu...s/tag/2000.3

Screenshot:

The Tryzub Ukrainian Stamp Album 2016 Supplement has been released!

Screenshot:



Downloads on my blog:

http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=1210