Cws World Supplements

Does anyone use the CWS supplements? Do you like them? I'm considering them as a potential solution to my desire for pre-illustrated pages. I've been busy adding stamps to the 1968 Citation I purchased a couple months back. For the late '60s to about 1980, I'm considering the CWS 1960-1980 supplement or finding a late '70s to early '80s Citation since Harris seems to have a habit of heavily covering the decade or so before publication. The latter would get me some pages for that year range and another big binder, which I'm going to need. Plus I actually like the enormous heft of the Citation binder. The down side is that of the pages, I'd only want the later years as I have an older Citation already.

I'm not sure which of the CWS pages or a Citation of that age would have better coverage of the '70s, or if they'd be about the same. Anyone have any idea there?

I've read some people saying they prefer the Harris supplements to CWS, but old Harris supplements are hard to find. I can order the CWS supplements back to 1981. For the '70s, other than that CWS 1960-1980 set, it's trickier. It looks like it comes down to trying to find albums where someone previously added those years. I'm finding that difficult. Even when I see an album for sale online that might be a candidate, it's often hard to tell exactly what they did for the pages. If pictures show some pages from the '70s, are they from supplements? Were they moved there from some other album? Are they from a Harris Deluxe, Senior Statesman, Citation, or what? These have different levels of coverage. Do they have all the years? Many I've seen skip years, like one I saw recently that had some pages up to 1972, and some from 1979-80, but it had almost nothing from '73-'78. It also wasn't every country A-Z, but that's a different issue.

For countries that I want to focus on more, there's the option of making my own pages. I've been messing with Albumeasy some. I don't relish that for the entire world though, nor do I intend to spend thousands of dollars buying Scott International volumes.

Callon, I've been in your shoes! I don't have a lot of experience with the cws supplements, but I remember the world supplements were cheaper, but not quite the quality of the Harris ones and they seem to have less coverage. They seem to be easier to find though. Not too long ago, one could find old Harris Supplements. You can still find the last 10 years without too much trouble. I know Golden Valley Stamps carries the last 5-10 years or so of the Harris. Subway Stamps has about 12 years, one as old as 1990. It all still adds up and I would recommend buying used albums wherever you can (especially ones with stamps :)
I was once on a long hunt to track down Harris Supplements and wound up picking up maybe 15 of them or so. I can say that out of all the ones from the mid 90's to 2010, the 1999 world Harris Supplement was about twice as large as the others. Pity all the years didn't have as good of coverage as that. I would also pick up blank or their speedrille pages to mount all those stamps that will be missing from those supplements. There are many.

Thanks for your thoughts. I actually already have a couple packs of speedrille pages. I haven't gotten to them yet as I've had my hands full moving the pre-1968 stamps from my old Ambassador album to the Citation, and adding more from thousands of loose stamps that I bought thus year. Then a few days ago I started moving stamps from an album I got a great deal on, a senior statesman binder of countries G-P with 9,000 or so stamps, very few duplicates, and thousands of them stamps I don't have. I don't even mind that much that it's a mess, with many stamps in the wrong places, and assorted Scott International pages spliced in there that are different sized pages. I'm just happy with the stamps and have many more hours to spend on that ahead of me.

But the post 1968 stamps are really piling up and it's time to figure out what to do with them. I went ahead and took a chance on a 1978 Citation that appears to have a couple supplements (goes thru 1980). I should get it next week. If trying to combine it with my older Citation is just a big mess, well, live and learn.

I received the '78 Citation and it looks like it would have suited my purposes well enough... if the contents were actually an entire '78 Citation album, which is what it was sold as. Unfortunately while it appears to be exactly that for some countries, for other countries it looks to be a mish-mash of different, lower end Harris album pages. For example, Bulgaria, DDR, and I forget what else are a smaller number of pages than I'd expect with many blanks instead of illustrations and no year ranges at the top of the page. Citation pages have years on the pages. For some other countries, the years are noted, but the pages have far more blanks than my '68 Citation (maybe they're from a Deluxe album?), fewer pages for a country, and sometimes end in the late '60s (and not just countries that changed names or quit issuing stamps back then). I wouldn't expect every country to go thru 1977 given the way Harris does albums and supplements, but I'd certainly expect closer to the 1978 album copyright than 1968.

So yeah, unfortunately it's a reminder that people can and do put whatever they want in album binders, forming many combinations of pages over the years. A couple dozen photos of album pages may not be enough to tell what's there. I'm still kind of debating complaining to the seller. They may not have looked closely enough at the album to know that it wasn't exactly what it appeared to be, but if they didn't know they probably should have. Someone looked closely enough to remove the stamps.

On the other hand, some countries have decent '70s coverage. I can use those. And it appears to have a 1980 supplement and one or both of the '78 and '79 supplements (so some countries have a gap from around 1970 thru '76 or '77). For the price it's not a bad deal, but not as good as expected.

Oh, and I bought one CWS supplement from the 1980s to check it out. It's not bad, but it's annoying that they don't bother to put years at the top of each page. Come on, how hard would that be? Sure, I can look up stamps, figure it out, and write that in myself, but they could easily save their customers the time.