World-Wide Starter Album

Could someone please recommend a good world wide album for beginners?

Prefer something under $100.

Thanks!

I know this is not what you are asking for but is worthy of consideration I feel.
Until you can decide how/what you want to collect have you considered a Stockbook.
You can safely keep and display your stamps and re-arrange to your hearts content.
This will help you decide on whether to organise by country, issue date or topic (thematically).

By theme (all US)



By (rough) issue date (all France)

There are some FREE worldwide albums..
search this site.. someone posted a link somewhere. all you need to do is download and print.

otherwise you can get a j. k. harris one pretty cheap.

I'm partial to (Scotts International Volume I) and they are widely available on ebay. I would suggest a lightly used Volume I 1840-1940 with very few stamps would run you about $50. This would make a great corner stone to an international collection and give you time to decide if you want to collect international or one particular country that strikes your fancy as you place different country stamps in it. Scott International album with 1000+ stamps prices would start rising based on quality and interest in that album. trick is to be patient, bid what you feel its worth and try again when another you like shows up. I have 11 albums all from ebay, and I've kept within the monthly budget (mostly)

I used to collect worldwide used by country first and stuck them in the spots printed but soon ran out of spaces and got the blank and quadrilled (lined) paper pages and sorted the stamps out by sets and sizes.

I didn't have a Scotts catalog for years so cdidn't really care about the dates. I just wanted them to look nice and arranging them by shape and size did the trick.

H.E Harris's Statesman albums are a good world wide album for a beginner. You can just buy the empty binders and print your own pages or just use quadrilled pages (or print your own also).

Any of these or any of the above mentioned by others can be had used (smell for mold or smoking damage or check for water damage or mold if really old and not kept in good storage conditions.

Get a decent sized binderedone to start, not small and not huge, as then you have room to expand and they are not too small and not too big to handle or grab by the spine and lift off the shelf.

Keep it stored standing upright most of the time and use some kind of dust cover. Dust and sun and moisture are stamp's worst enemies.

Thanks folks for the ideas -- I am still a little confused but, now I have a place to start

I think it would be difficult not to be confused because there are so many options to consider, ranging from aesthetics to how much money you want to spend.

The good news is that there are hundreds of thousands of worldwide stamps that are inexpensive, interesting, and just begging to be collected. The bad news is there are hundreds of thousands of worldwide stamps.... As the maximum number of stamps that can be practically housed in a single binder is probably around 50-60,000, you will quickly acquire lots of stamps that aren't in your album. Even if that doesn't frustrate you, I am unaware of any single volume albums with even 50K stamps currently available for sale. The one volume H. E. Harris Statesman album has spaces for 25,000 stamps. (There used to be more album options for the worldwide collector and you can often find these out-of-print volumes on ebay, but then you run into the problem of what do with more recent stamps.)

Since you want to keep your cost below $100, I suggest two possibilities to get you started. The first is stockbooks as has already been suggested. Google 'keijo stamp blog' for lots of ideas on worldwide collecting in general and stockbooks in specific. While I am not as much a fan of stockbooks for housing a collection as some collectors, one great advantage is that even if you switch at a later date to printed albums or albums you create yourself, you can always use your stockbooks for stamps waiting to be mounted, etc.

If you prefer the idea of a printed worldwide album, consider the computer produced pages by William Steiner (Stamp Album Web). A year's membership with unlimited downloads of pages for individual countries is $30. As you acquire stamps, download the pages for the countries involved and then print out only the page(s) for which you have stamps. Acquire more stamps, print out more pages. If you like this idea after visiting Steiner's website, I suggest posting another message here as there are several members who can give suggestions on paper quality, laser vs. ink jet, etc.

I don't mean any of this to discourage you. I'm having a great time with my worldwide collection although I did make it easy on myself by limiting my collection to the first 100 years of postage stamps.