Frustration With Scott Minuteman 20th Century Album

By way of background, I began collecting US stamps as a pre-teen around 1957. I stupidly sold my first album several years later. Soon after leaving the Marine Corps, I purchased a new, 1972 Scott Minuteman Album for US stamps, with my interest being pre-1960. Like many of us, the album was eventually put away for decades due to work/family. In 2007, I purchased over 650 US, mostly classic, covers I stumbled on at an antique store. They went into storage (vertically) for 15 years.

I retired two years ago, and six months ago I began cataloging the covers. While doing that, the urge to place stamps on an album page resurfaced, so I purchased the Scott 20th Century US Album pages for $20 on eBay to complete the century and bought a quarter pound of US commemoratives from Mystic.

And then the frustration began. While it was easy to locate stamps in the 1972 album, where, with few exceptions, the Scott numbers were in numerical order, that was the exception with the new album pages. While I understand that stamps in a series could now span several years and be grouped together in the new pages in a year different from the issue year (learning curve), I do not understand this:




It took me 10 minutes to locate the Lily Pons stamp, looking for its picture on album pages before locating its Scott number on the above page. Why would a whole page be dedicated to just three stamps, and contain no pictures of those stamps nor any information about each stamp other than they are opera singers?

I would like to replace that and similar pages with "normal" pages containing a picture of each stamp, with a brief narrative below each one. I'm ignorant of how to accomplish that, so I'm looking to y'all for guidance.

The page is meant to hold the entire pane of stamps.
Don

Thanks Don. My 2014 Scott Specialized shows other panes, but shows the American Music Series as individual stamps, hence my bad assumption as I'm sure you would know. My learning curve continues. It's a shame that the individual narratives are not given due to the format.

Oops, sorry didn't look close enough. It calls out a block or strip of four (3154-3157)

Of course, the 1940 Famous American Issues only provides a general narrative for each group.

There is an album designed for people who collect singles, and that is the Scott National Used Singles album. This is quite a bit more expensive than the minuteman so may not be worth it from the cost/value perspective.

Got it. One would think they still had room for a narrative.

Thanks stamperJD. I'll look into it.

I do wish I had known about Scott's Singles Album before this. Up until now I have been using Scott blank pages and AlbumEasy to 'break apart' panes such as "Legends of the West" and booklets. As I was off collecting for a long time and my album goes only to 2005, I think I'll get the singles pages next time if I ever get my collection up to that point

There is a lot of mention of Steiner Pages as something to fill in the gaps. It would appear that with improving my skills I would be able to engineer a page and get good paper stock and have a printing company make the desired pages. Given time I might get there some day. It would be great if a digital tutor was available for this.

Just for future reference, the Harris Liberty Album has additional pages for US singles. But no Scott numbers, of course. Fully illustrated, with little in the way of descriptive text. So, if someone is doing singles, they can swap out the "multiples" pages with the "singles" pages. These are 9x12 inch pages, on the lighter side of the spectrum. Much cheaper than the Scott singles pages...

John