Harris Supplement Question

As I'm having trouble finding any good descriptions of the annual supplements, I'm still wondering how these work. One eBay seller described a Harris supplement (for 2012 I think) as 128 pages with 64 countries. If accurate, nowhere near every country is covered. So do they update some countries just every few years as in 2012 might show stamps from say, 2009 to 2012, for a given country? Then 2013 updates some countries that weren't in 2012, etc.?

I'm obviously guessing. There isn't even a local store near me for stamp collectors where I can take a look at the products. We still have several coin dealers in town but didley-squat for stamps.

For more info- have a look at www.FVHstamps.com website under albums and supplements for a list of Harris album supplements for Canada, US, worldwide up to 2020 and 2021 for some countries. Dont forget that is quoted in Canadian $. Roughly $1.00 US = 1.30 cdn.

Callon,

I'm a long-time Harris user. If you are looking for comprehensive coverage, you will not find it with Harris, period. The supplements are pretty reasonably priced, but some are hard to find, depending on what year you want to update to. If you are looking to update 10-30 years worth, it will be expensive. As you surmised, some countries are only updated every few years in the supplements.

I'm convinced that a far better solution is to get blank or quadrille pages. In Harris lingo, quadrille is "Speedrille", Label them with Country and Year and there you go. You can easily incorporate them into your Harris albums. Shop around if you decide to go this route, as they are frequently on sale. The new ones are five hole punched, i.e., they fit both the two post and larger 3 ring binders (Vario G, for example).

John

If you're referring to the Harris Statesman Worldwide album, here's the description from iHobb:


Certainly not comprehensive, and coverage determined by the whims of the editors, as is common with worldwide albums.

Your guess is correct. Several years worth of (limited) updates of certain countries might be condensed in one year's supplement. Hong Kong was one like that for a long time. That meant that if you missed the year that was done, then you were probably out of luck. It's near impossible to know the years when this was done, made even more difficult since old yearly supplements only seem to be found in brick-and-mortar stamp store holdings, if they have them at all. And those sellers likely won't crack open a sealed supplement package because the next potential customer won't buy it.

Keeping up with yearly supplements also means that countries that always issue a lot of stamps like (say) Hungary and Togo will be filling a lot of space in the new binders you will be buying. So if your album is new and updated, I'd buy the next couple of supplements to see if they fill the bill. Otherwise, blank/Speedrille pages work.

Thanks for the responses. They help. Partial coverage plus an easy way to add quadrille pages as I wish is what I'm leaning toward. The jury is still out on the supplements. The latest Harris Statesman I can find states that select countries are updated through 2010 with the US and Canada through 2016. If I wanted old supplements, I take it I should start with 2011 if I can find it?

Are you looking at the latest Harris Statesman Deluxe (2-Volume set)? Do you already have it, or are you just doing research on purchasing a set?

The reason I ask is that that particular two volume set is heavily focused on the 21st century, with bare bones coverage before that, and nothing after 2010 (except USA and Canada, as you note).

What are your collecting goals - 21st Century and beyond? If that's the case (say, 21st Century used, for example) then this set of 2 volumes might be a good starting point.

Otherwise, I would never recommend this particular set of volumes because:

1. The binders are extremely flimsy and cheap.
2. The paper and printing is often sub-standard.
3. The (pre-2000s) coverage is pathetic, even for a Harris album.

If you are looking for decent coverage for earlier issues, the $100+ spent on this new 2-volume set might be better spent on a vintage Harris Citation Album, which
is a single volume with 65-75K spaces for stamps, and 35-45K of illustrations. If you can find a lightly used one with all the pages intact dated from the 1960's to
early 1970's, it will form a good starting point for a worldwide collection, in one volume.

All of this is my personal opinion as a long-time Harris album user.

The latest versions are a big disappointment to me.

John

Yes, and I don't have it yet. I'm researching.




So it's mostly 2000-2010? I hope it's not that narrow. At this point I have very little in the way of post-2000 stamps. I expect that to grow gradually, but not as a particular focus area.

I saw a comment somewhere complaining about the newest Statesman's very sparse coverage before around 1970. That's not ideal, but maybe not a deal breaker for me. It's hard to imagine it being more sparse than my old Ambassador album from when I was a kid. That's what I'm replacing. Obviously I'm not expecting anything close to complete coverage. I know the crazy number of volumes that takes.

The Citation looks pretty good for its time period, but then what? That's a whole lot of supplements, most long, long out of print, to even finish the 20th century.

The problem seems to be finding anything that's at all decent and affordable for both before 1960 or 1970 and the '70s going forward. Am I missing something or are most of the international albums still being published on the very expensive side? (e.g. Stanley-Gibbons, Palo) The lower price range albums are mostly gone. I'm not looking to spend thousands. I'm not looking to spend $500 for that matter, but I don't want a 100 page kids album. Steiner is inexpensive, but I don't need complete coverage and would like the convenience of pre-printed.

I wonder how much overlap there is between a Citation and a new Statesman Deluxe? Having both is a messy solution though as there's obviously going to be some overlap, making combining the pages from each an ugly proposition.

I wish there was somewhere I could flip through a Statesman album and see if it'll work for me. None of the sellers I've found online have a "look inside" feature or other screenshots though.

Callon,

I will try and make a more detailed reply to your thoughtful posting, but for now...




What you are looking for, IMHO, is AlbumEasy. You will find many user-made illustrated albums on the AlbumEasy website. The great part is you can edit the available albums to your taste, or, make one completely to your own specifications. A few hours devoted to learning AlbumEasy will pay off for many years to come.

https://www.thestampweb.com/albumeasy

John

The Statesman appears to be at least as sparse on the earlier issues back to the time of the last one volume version and it's not going to be much better than your old Ambassador. Sadly, whoever put together the 2-volume was not a worldwide collector. Since issues from the 1980s to date far outnumber previous issues, that person or persons assumed (badly) that most of anyone's acquisitions would be very modern. That only works for those who are only interested in very modern stamps and perhaps constantly buying recent on-paper kiloware and have secret/private sources for countries like Ecuador and Myanmar.



Even in my ancient Citation (originally a c.1965 version), pre-1940 stamps were given just one page side for many countries. Netherlands and New Zealand have just 3 page sides for pre-1940 stamps. Not enough for me. Now remember the pages are interchangeable so integrating an old Citation into Statesman pages works up to a point. You might end up with a few cases of duplicate page sides or images, though. But it sounds like you would already want to expand out of that hybrid situation anyway.



That's largely because very much fewer are being printed these days due to very much lower demand; no economy of scale to keep costs down. Around where I lived there was a stamp store in just about every major neighborhood, not to mention the department stores and variety stores that had stamps and supplies for sale. And compare today's album prices to bound printed books of equivalent mass that will never get remaindered like technical or specialist books that will not be found in mall bookstores. It's not all that bad, or it's equally bad, depending on your point of view.



You can just buy what you need/want and print out pages at your leisure. Check 'em out again. You can leave off the relatively empty countries you currently have, keeping them in the Ambassador or a stockbook until you make a purchase that you feel justifies moving into new pages.

You can also join GeoffHa, me and others on the Dark Side, creating album pages from blanks/quadrille. Making pages is not for everyone, but is as therapeutic as slugging stamps into album spaces. My pages tend to be packed and not elegantly arranged, not as bad as a typical HE Harris page but close, since I'm trying to save shelf space. Spaces for thousand dollar stamps are left out. More importantly, my pages are one-sided and I have the obscure countries on separate pages so I can arrange them alphabetically so I can find them. I just have pencil notes to help with adding new stuff, nothing permanent - worksforme. Only countries with enough stamps justify moving into this format, and the new pages are in the same albums as original album pages.

hy-brasil

Wonderful posting!




Indeed. Another reason to consider AlbumEasy. You can create awesome quadrille pages of any size easily with hardly any effort at all. And, to your own personal specifications. I find myself using them more and more often, as there is no realistic (and affordable) pre-printed album solution any more. Without investing a lot of time and energy in designing illustrated stamp albums I mean.

John

Obviously, the dominant nature of the dark side operation is villanous - perhaps removing other collectors with poisoned cheescake or similar - but the creation of albums provides the necessary light to balance the shade of evil. When I was an enthusiastic child stamp-collector in the 1960s, loose-leaf, springback albums were the norm once you'd outgrown the basic, page-per-country printed albums. After the 1930s, large, worldwide, printed albums of the Big Blue type were no longer produced here (and, if they had been, they'd have been more purchased for than used by young collectors). In other words, any twelve-year-old could knock out his or her own album. Which makes it odd that adults today find that a challenge, with all sorts of odd "my handwriting's poor" excuses. It really isn't, and you can have the album you want, and a satisfying journey in producing it, if you see collecting as more than filling a page as rapidly and as easily as possible.

Per GeoffHa, it is the journey of discovery in stamp collecting - tracking down wants, seeing what's out there including things you'll never afford or collect, researching and studying, meeting collectors and dealers and so on - that's a big part of the hobby, to some at least. If it's just packrat numbers of stamps in your hoard or $$$$$, just remember the Collyer Brothers.

So here's a recently done page of mine on a Speedrille-type page. I only collect used when possible. Here, it's set up so I can fill in the blanks and pretty much in Scott order. Too packed? You can do it any way you like. An AlbumEasy quadrille page would have made a title header and notes on other pages easily done.


Who needs frames around stamps? Not me.

hy-brasil:

I like this page - there is elegance in its simplicity.

John

Gone full Minkus there! I've veered between the full page and the "let them breathe". Inclined to the latter at present, although I don't like the approach of the past of perhaps one small set on a page.

Are you just using office-type paper? I use album leaves, which cost around £115 for 500 quadrille pages here - more for the black leaves. As kids, we used graph paper from Woolies.

"Never go full Minkus!" (Everything I know about philately I learned from the movies.)