Switzerland Album Recommendation

Hi.

I think I'd like to purchase an album to house my growing Swiss collection. I could go with a Scott country album, but I'm not a fan of the way early issues are jammed together.

Can anyone recommend alternatives that may offer a more spacious layout?

Regards,
Dale

Not aware of a Scott Country Album Layout.
Steiner's Offering?

I'm pretty happy w the Leuchturm album, but it's not cheap.

Dale, it sounds to me like you have specific needs/desires in mind for your Switzerland album.

If you use AlbumEasy, you can design to taste. If you use one of the Switzerland examples freely available there, you won't even have to measure the stamps. It would take some time to design/print your album, but you would be in control as far as how it would look.

John

Here, you can find what Lindner has to offer. They have sets of periods and types of issues. Often, SAFE and Leuchtturm (Lighthouse) follow this concept as well. As they all have loose-leaf systems and blank pages, it is easy to add specialist items if there are no separate pages.

https://www.lindner-original.de/bri...ropa/schweiz

Lighthouse:
https://www.leuchtturm.com/collect-...%5D=10017597

If you can wait, hang on and go to some stamp shows. There are often used albums being sold with some stamps in them at a huge discount. You can also get a chance to see what these albums look like for other countries if they do not have Switzerland.

Schaubek are a little cheaper than Lighthouse and Lindner ("Brilliant" are their hingeless pages)

https://www.schaubek.de/Switzerland_3

Yvert/Marini also offer 22-ring albums

https://www.yvert.com/CT-1477-pages...me=match_and

Surprised no one has yet mentioned Zumstein's offering: https://www.briefmarken.ch/zshop/co...de/d496.html or the Christen album: https://www.briefmarken.ch/zshop/co...de/d499.html

I would second the suggestion to look at Schaubek, they have really nice heavy paper quality. Or else make your own using Album Easy.

My thoughts and of course you have your own album needs and aesthetics.

I find Steiner pages just as crowded as any other album pages, more than most. So I don't use them except when I need to print a replacement page. For that I print out and then use that copy to photocopy the pages in question (at Fedex) onto blank paper of the same size as the other pages in the album. It works well. Or I transfer the Steiner page file into MS Word (free programs to do this are available online) and then do some editing of the layout, eliminating some boxes etc, then remove the borders, and then print out the borderless pages I need and photocopy them onto bordered Scott Specialty pages to match my other album pages. This works surprisingly well.

I use mainly Scott albums which have good quality paper and good layouts, are easy to buy and get additional pages and blank pages for, and are much less expensive than all other albums I'm familiar with. Nearly all my collections are in Scott albums.

Scott pages are punched both for two-square-post binders and 3-rings. The small 3-ring Scott binders make nice albums, though you'll need a lot of them, while the larger size Scott 3-ring binders which hold more pages seem enormous and inelegant too me. I use the 2 post binders, myself.

I've tried to like Schaubek albums but they are pretty expensive. Not as bad as Lindner or Lighthouse, though. Those albums will bankrupt you pretty fast, though I do like the Lighthouse pages very much even if they do seem a little too "Germanic" for my taste, meaning the border is very plain and so on. They're like less-overfilled Steiner pages.

Both Schaubek and Lighthouse use these weird slits along the left-hand margins to help with folding pages when they're in their two post-finders. I find these slits unattractive so that puts me off both brands, but you may not feel that way.

Lindner I've never liked because of all the plastic they use, but many people seem to like them. All that plastic makes the albums super heavy, and is really not necessary just to display stamps. They are very expensive like most of the others. I have some Lindner albums, and I just do not like them. You may, though.

The Yvert album mentioned above is actually a Marini (from Italy) album which Yvert imports and sells. They are very nice but little known in the U.S. It's one of my favorites maybe because I like the Italian style more than others. Compared to the rather bleak Lighthouse pages, the Marini pages are more elegant. The title font is nicer and page layouts are very nice. These are 22-ring albums which is a very comfortable way to turn pages or move pages around in the binder very easily. Scott should have used this method instead of their 3-ring pages. These albums can be bought direclty from Marini in Italy. For their website, look up "Marini francobolli" which means "stamps" in Italian, and work on figuring out the Italian on their webpage. Use Google Tranlsate to help with that. I've ordered from them and was very pleased. Or I suppose you couild buy the same album from Yvert in France and translate their page the same way. I've ordered from them, too, and it works out just fine. Not cheap albums, though, so be warned.

Another option is Davo which makes very nice albums in the Netherlands. Their web pages are in English. Their prices are still pretty high, but the paper quality is good even if the page layouts are extremely simple and a bit bleak. I have one Davo album (Belgium) which I bought once in Brussels, and I like it. But I like my album pages a little nicer and fancier looking which means a nicer font and a little fancier border than a single boring line. You may not care.

For all these brands, you will need multiple volumes, so multiply by $200, $300 or whatever each volume costs, then mortgage the house. Except for Scott albums, of course which are a lot more affordable and still very nice in all important respects. A full run of Scott albums for Switzerland might cost three or four hundred dollars all told. The other brands will cost well over a thousand dollars, probably more, if you plan to collect the whole country (as I generally do). So, yes, get a second job.

Whichever you choose, have fun.

That's a very nice summary, Drew.
My quick thoughts (worth less than $0.02, I'm sure ): ideally, I'd use a specialist-yes-I-know-that's-a-loaded-word album from each country, if I could. My belief is that 90% of the time no one covers a specific nation better than a philatelic company in that nation: Yvert for France, EDIFIL Spain, Scott for USA, Christen for Switzerland, etc. But shelf aesthetics matter a great deal to me too, so I use Lighthouse all-around, except for Commonwealth, which is SG.
Expensive? Yeah, I guess. But not compared to their contents and ideal for the way I collect (MNH, and only to 1950-ish), and it keeps the shelf of albums away from some dark corner of the house where the wife would want me to keep otherwise ugly albums.
So, I'd ask the OP: how much do you care about a "unified look" on the shelf with your (presumably) other albums? Or thoroughness/depth of Swiss coverage? Or budget? 2-post or 3-ring or 22? Album color? Weight of paper? Oversized, A4, letter? Lots of choices to be had out there.

I went a different direction; I have the Minkus specialty album for Switzerland. I find the layouts to be quite excellent. I had to take a few hours to translate the Minkus numbers to Scott, But once done I was very happy with the selection. If you want, I'd be happy to send you some page scans of the early issues to let you see what they look like.

I have to say that I really like my Lindner album. I don't have a lot of free time, so sliding my acquistions into the plastic sleeves makes things fast and simple and I can easily see the backs of the stamps if I need to look at something.
After having my album for a year and a half, I was surprised to recently discover an extra benefit to the Lindner albums I hadn't thought of. For a person that wants to maintain a collection of both mint and postmarked stamps, you can put the mint stamps in the plastic sleeve portion and then the stamped version can be mounted to the page underneath. So you can display your mint stamps and flip the page to see the postmarked versions. If you don't have mint version of a stamp, the postmarked version you do have underneath it will still show up. Not sure why I didn't think of this, but recently acquired a collection of portomarken done in this fashion, so likely will go through that process with my album so I can have both in one album.
Just a thought.

Funny you say that, SAFE makes a point in their literature of advertising this feature for their albums: "Collect both mint and used stamps on the same album page – attach the used stamps with a hinge to the illustrated cardboard page. The foil top page acts as the interleaf."

Yeah, when I realized this option, I was like, "well duh! Why did I not realize this before now?".
Being relatively new to all this on any serious level, I stumbled on the Lindner pages in some other forum and was enticed simply because I wouldn't have to deal with hinges and stamp sleeves which would take a lot of precious time I don't have in my life. I'll still have to go that route for the underlayer, but don't feel it's as urgent anymore (I embarked on this journey to try to help my father, who is falling into demntia, finish his stamp album that he started when he was growing up in Schwyz in the early 40s). The non-mint collection will get added under the mint eventually, if I ever have free time and I can work on it with my son. I hope you found an album solution that works best for you.