Worldwide Collection Using A Combination Of Scott International And Steiner Pages

I don't think there is a great solution for an album for a comprehensive worldwide collection, but I'd be interested in what other comprehensive worldwide collectors do.

I now use a combination of Scott International and Steiner pages housed in 69 Scott International binders. The Steiner pages are printed on paper that matches the size of Scott International pages, but I have not bothered to try to match the borders. It's not the prettiest solution aesthetically, but it suits me.

I don't know how many people will be interested in this, but here is how I developed my set of albums.

I went through several phases to develop this collection:

Phase 1 (assembling used Scott International pages):


When I was a younger collector, I did not have much money to spend on stamp albums, so I would buy old collections on Scott International pages to try to assemble as close as I could get to comprehensive coverage cheaply. At this time, there were no Steiner pages and, at least as far as I knew, no source on International-sized pages of anything close to comprehensive coverage for pre-1940.

Phase 2 (big splurge on International pages and weird shipping accident):


Sometime in the 1990s, a stamp dealer (I won't name him) offered a deal on Scott International pages at prices that seemed too good to be true. But I scraped up the money to buy new Scott International pages from 1940 through 1992 from this dealer.

In fact, the deal was too good to be true. I don't think the dealer was trying to cheat me, but he was deeply incompetent. (I think the dealer is deceased now, but I saw somewhere that he had been banned by the American Philatelic Society before he passed away).

The pages arrived in two boxes, but one box was ripped open and contained a mix of Scott International pages (with many loose pages from packages that had torn open) and a whole bunch of vintage college football game programs.

I assume the college football programs were valuable, because the dealer agreed to refund my money for the International pages in the damaged box, if I would return the football programs to him. And I could keep the pages that remained in the box, without cost.

Financially, this turned out to be a fairly good deal. But rather than having a full set of Scott International pages from 1940-1992, I had a large number of countries in the first half of the alphabet for whom I was missing some or all of the pages for the years 1986 through 1992.

Phase 3 (purchasing Scott International supplements new through 1999):

As I got older, I could afford to spend more, so I purchased all the Scott International supplements from 1993 through 1999. These were absurdly expensive, so I thought I would stop my collection with 1999 and leave the 21st century for others.

This proved unsatisfactory, as I still had many gaps for the 1986-1992 period due to the weird accident. I'd occasionally pick up used Scott pages to fill in these gaps, but a lot of gaps remained. It also turned out that I couldn't resist accumulating 21st century stamps and I needed somewhere to keep them.

More important, the severe limitations of the pre-1940 Scott International ("Big Blue") were increasingly annoying. Way too many pages were packed with stamps in the margins that Scott had no spaces for.

This was all annoying enough that I drifted away from stamp collecting for several years and focused on my coin collection.

Phase 4 (Steiner arrives and do-it-yourself project begins):


Then I learned about Bill Steiner's pages, which are truly very close to comprehensive. This was wonderful news.

My plan was to use Steiner pages to (a) replace all pre-1940 Scott International pages, (b) fill in the random gaps in my 1986-1982 pages caused by the shipping accident, and (c) strictly on an "as needed" basis, print pages for 21st century stamps that I had acquired, with no attempt to make the 21st century pages comprehensive.

I found a local printer who was able to supply a stock of acid-free blank pages, of roughly the same weight and color as Scott International pages, cut to Scott International size and hole-punched to fit International volumes.

For about a year or so, I would print Steiner pages on 8 1/2 x 11 paper and then use my fancy office copy machine to copy the pages onto the blank International size pages. (I owned the business, so no theft from an employer was involved.)

This worked fine, but was incredibly time-consuming. So I did a lot of looking around and found another printer in the DC area who was willing to work with me. That printer agreed to print two-sided copies on acid-free International size and weight paper, hole punched to fit International volumes.

However, the printer needed a single pdf file that they could just print straight through. It probably took me a solid week or two of work, but I did manage to cut and paste Steiner files into a single large pdf file that would (a) cover all world issues through 1940, (b) fill in the 1986-1992 gaps in my collection, and (c) cover 21st century issues for a few countries I was particularly interested in, such as the US, France, Germany, and Brazil.

This cost me $2200 and I got about a thousand leftover blank pages for future use. I was planning to use these to print out 21st century pages as needed and to correct the inevitable errors that I had made in assembling my huge pdf file for the printer.

It took a long time to assemble these printed two-sided Steiner pages (about 4 banker's boxes full) into my already existing set of Scott International page, but when I was finished, I had about a 50-volume collection that was reasonably complete through 1999, with a few forays into the 21st century.

Phase 5 (now):

I thought I was done.

(a) But then I retired and lost access to my copy machine. I did a lot of research, but the only wide-format printer I could find on which I could directly print Steiner pages was the Canon Pixma IX 6820 business printer. This wasn't outrageously expensive (about $300), but it's an ink jet, very slow, and the replacement ink is outrageously expensive. However, it gives me the flexibility to print my own Steiner pages onto Scott International size paper as needed.

(b) I thought a thousand blank pages would be all the pages I would ever need, but I quickly ran out of paper. Fortunately, I went online and was able to find a supplier of pages cut and punched to fit Scott International albums at what I thought was a decent cost ($371 for 3000 pages). The vendor was Limited Papers in Newark NJ. (The paper they used was an acid-free 60-weight Cougar Natural Opaque smooth.)

(c) I finally gave up on the idea of only limited coverage for the 21st century and went ahead and bought the Scott supplements for all years from 2000 through 2023. I've incorporated these through 2022, which has brought me up to 69 volumes in Scott International binders.

(d) The Scott Supplements do not provide anything like "comprehensive" coverage for the 21st century, however. Scott is now ignoring many countries, particularly countries like Mongolia, which issue abusively large numbers of new stamp issues, mostly CTOs. In addition, for all years (20th and 21st centuries), Scott ignores virtually all souvenir sheets and many miniature sheets, as well as most perf and watermark varieties.

So now, on an as-needed basis, I am printing Steiner pages to fill in the many, many gaps in the Scott International pages. I'm getting old, so I will likely never print the thousands of pages needed to make the set anywhere near comprehensive (21st century Mongolia and Cuba pages are very low on my priority list, for example).

If anyone has made it this far, thanks for reading.

Doug

Wow, Doug! What a journey. I'm especially intrigued that you put all the Steiner files into one big PDF and then got it printed. My goodness!

I know my relatively meagre worldwide collection would look lost in 69 binders. What's it been like filling up these hard-won pages?

Oh, those pages are very far from full.

I've never counted the stamps, but I'd guess the 69 volumes have fewer than 100,000 stamps in them.

But I have vast quantities of material ready to be incorporated and now I have a place for all of them.

To clarify, I didn't put ALL the Steiner files into a pdf, only the pre-1940 files and selected files thereafter. That was a big enough task. I'd hate to think about putting all of them into a single file.

The biggest problem with the pdf was inserting blank pages at the proper places so every country and every BOB type (semi-postail, airmail, etc.) started on a new page. Since I was printing two-sided to save space, that was very tricky.

An interesting story Snopes.

I think every collector goes through a process to make their collection fit their own style.

I just finished merging 2 sets of big blues to get one that would have most of the printed pages. I saw a progression of mounting from the larger old green hinges to the thinner green hinges to the awful crystal mounts to the awful modern hinges. One collector liked mint more and the other liked used more.

"I saw a progression of mounting from the larger old green hinges to the thinner green hinges to the awful crystal mounts to the awful modern hinges."

Ha! I've gone through the same progression. It hurts me every time I have to remove an old "good hinge" and replace it with today's sorry substitutes. Why can't someone just find a way to go back to the old manufacturing specs for hinges?

Great story Doug, thank you for sharing it with us.

With the exception of Us, my entire World Wide Collection is on Steiner Pages. I now have 155 albums for assorted countries. This has worked very well for me.

Good luck on your continuing journey

Dianne

Dianne -

I am envious. If I had it to do over, I'd probably go with all Steiner pages too.

A couple of questions. (1) Did you print the pages two-sided? (2) Were there some countries that you did not print all the page for? For example, I just can't bring myself to print pages for countries that issue scads of CTOs every year, since I know I'm unlikely to ever buy any of those stamps.

Doug

Doug ---Interesting story ,you clearly had more issues than I had . I picked up a clean set of Internationals in the mid 1970's and they were my main collection until the Steiner Pages came out .

"I picked up a clean set of Internationals in the mid 1970's and they were my main collection until the Steiner Pages came out ."

Do you print your Steiner pages on the same size and color of paper as your International pages?

Hi, Doug. I have a 40-volume set of Scott Internationals.

But I use 2.5" thick binders once sold by Subway Stamp Shop which are identical to the 'real' Scott binders, just narrower so they can be handled much more comfortably because they are not as heavy. I bought them used on ebay more than 10 years ago but have never seen them for sale again. So my "40" volumes probably equals your 30 volumes -- give or take. And I've added some used early Scott International binders in their no-longer-available size of "about" 3" thick --- close to the width of the other binders. I find Scott's current International binders (3.5") too thick for comfort, so I won't use them. I imagine collectors sometimes drop those large heavy binders filled with pages.

Also, for the sake of sanity, I decided on a couple of things right at the beginning of this worldwide collection:

My main collections include dozens of countries I collect (about another 40) in Scott Specialty albums, the green ones that are very comprehensive. So I use my blue International albums for my duplicates and "overflow" from these. The International stamp collection consists basically of what I liked as a kid -- collecting all those strange foreign countries. Plus I wanted a place to mount duplicates and not just box them up. So my main stamp interests are in the individual country albums. T.

Besides more comfortable binders, I also decided not to go completely insane by collecting worldwide stamps too far into the modern era which I could never afford and would never find enough time to do. The "Classic Era" is too short for my taste, 1840-1940, so I settled on 1975 as my end year -- and I'm glad I did.

The flood of unnecessary stamps that overwhelmed stamp collectors got out of control in the 1960s, so 1975 seemed "far enough" to go. But ending my world collection even a few years earlier would not have been a bad idea, either -- maybe 1970? Maybe 1960? My own collecting years began in the 1950s, 60s and part of the 70s before adult life, so collecting up to that year covers all those stamps I had wanted to own back then.

I also add pages to my International album -- in two ways.

1. I bought some of Subway Stamp Shop's special reprinting of the Big Brown International albums, the original far more comprehensive version of the International album covering 1840-1940. It's far more complete than the current slimmed-down International which omits many more expensive and hard-to-get stamps from before 1940, as you've noticed. By adding some (certainly not most) of these pages to many countries followed by the post-1940 pages which are much more complete than the earlier "regular" International pages ever were, I've got a much more comprehensive album. And I didn't have to print a single additional page. These Big Brown album pages are printed on only one side so it's easy to put them in the right location.

2. I also purchase all-blank International pages from the seller of the printed version of Bill Steiner's pages, albumpages.net. I print a Steiner layout on these blank pages when I need to.

And I also purchase pre-printed International pages from that same source when I don't want to print them myself. They're not expensive. Since all these are also printed on one-side, fitting them into the right location in my albums is easy.

I feel souvenir sheets are a silly tax on stamp collectors since they're not designed for postal use but to sell to collectors. So their omission from the Scott International is a plus for me.

Your worldwide collection is far more massive than mine but it serves a very different purpose than mine. I have no idea how you store all those volumes, though, or how you can afford the massive numbers of stamps you must need! It's very impressive to say the least.

Just saw this thread now... Thank you Snopes for your album evolution, many of us can relate. Storage can be a big problem when tackling the world for sure!

Drew - I share your concerns about the size of the Scott International volumes. I even have some of their "jumbo" albums, which are monsters. One of those could do real damage if I drop it on my foot.

As a result of my years-long project, I now have about 2 1/4 bankers' boxes of duplicate printed album pages, mostly Scott but with some Steiner pages mixed in. My very rough guess is that there are about 5000 pages.

There are a few duplicates, but I tried hard to eliminate these.

There are very few pre-1940 Scott pages included in this group. It's almost entirely 1940 to the present. Most pages are used (no stamps), but quite a few are new. There are gaps and omissions, but also many long runs of years for many countries for which the Scott pages are completely, mostly for years between 1940-1999.

This is something I would have killed for when I was assembling my own set of Scott/Steiner pages. However, I am not interested in selling these duplicate pages.

I'd be most interested in giving these pages to a collector who is working on their own set of worldwide pages. However, they are very bulky so ideally the collector would be within driving distance of the DC area.

If I can't find a collector to give these to, I might approach some dealers at a local stamp show and see if they have any interest in giving me some trade value in exchange for the pages.

If anyone is interested in having these pages, please let me know.

Hi Snopes, I live in northern Virginia, right next to Dulles airport and not far from the DC area. How far are you from me? Regards,

Bradley

Bradley -

I am in Arlington, easy driving distance. Text me at *** to discuss this further.

Doug

* * * Personal identification information removed by moderator. Please review the rules you agreed to when signing up for this forum * * *

Bradley -

The staff here removed my cell phone number and sent me an email saying I could not send an email to you. I looked up the policy and they say there is no reason for me to be able to send an email until I have made 50 "quality" posts.

I'm puzzled by this because I'm not trying to sell anything and it is my own personal information, so there is no privacy concern.

But it's their forum so they can set whatever rules they want. However, this makes it impossible for me to give the pages to you.

I see that you have made 84 posts, so could you please try emailing me? I don't know whether that will be blocked too. If that doesn't work you could try sending me a friend request on Facebook or LinkedIn, I guess.

Or I guess we could coordinate a time and place to meet. You could tell me a public location near your house and I could bring the pages out to you. Or we could pick somewhere midway between Ashburn and Arlington.

Doug Herbert