New Album Arrived Today!

Just wanted to report on my new stamp album, the Mystic Heirloom Album with the new binders. These pages are not the new hingeless, but I wanted to mount my own stamps. The binders are the new ones, though, and they are very nice. Especially for the money. I'm very pleased with both pages and binders.

I also got a few other supplies, tongs, watermark fluid (evaporates almost too quickly), blank pages, perf gauge. The perf gauge is see-through which is nice, but it's very thin plastic.

I have quite a few U.S. stamps in an old Grossman album which was great but is now falling apart (30+ years). I've been out of the hobby for 10 years but super-excited to get back into it.

Waiting for October for the new 2013 Scott catalogue to come out. While I'm waiting, I'll be moving my collection to the new albums and am already buying a few stamps from online auctions.

I want to thank you all for information I've read here in SCF and anticipate a lot of fun and sharing in the future.

Congratulations! You have alot of work ahead of you!

It's always fun to read posts like this that take us all back to the earliest days of feeling that same excitement. For many, it's never left us since!

Kurt

Welcome to SCF. Enjoy your new albums, it sounds like a nice winter project.

One suggestion, I use that album. My only complaint is that the paper stock on the non-hingeless pages is too thin. If you use mounts it will look better if you enclose pages in protectors. Yiou'll need to get the punched, not the tabbed ones.

How thick is the paper on the hingeless album?

On the normal one it's probably 24 weight... I hope it's thicker on the new one.

If you go to Mystic's web page and do a search for DS117, it shows the item. It states, "...U.S. album printed on high-quality, 70-pound paper stock....". I know it's heavier than regular 20 lb. paper, but I can't tell if it's 70 lb. The person taking my order said it is heavier paper (whatever that means) but not as heavy as the hingeless. For the page protectors, all I can picture are those with pockets to hold the entire page; their holes are what you secure in the binder. I would think you need ones where the protector is the same size as the album page; both the protector AND the album page holes would go over the binder rings. Hope that makes sense. Do you know of any brands like that?

leoh, I too use the Mystic album and really enjoy it. You will find that the supplements are not as expensive either when it is time to order them. A few years ago I had the idea of using page protectors for souvenir sheets. I thought that it would be cheaper (and it was) than buying mounts for those larger items. I was then going to insert that page into the Mystic album where the SS would normally go. What I discovered was that the page protectors were wider than the Mystic pages. The SS would eventually migrate over to the outer edge out beyond the Mystic pages. After seeing the first bend in the SS I decided to have an album exclusively for SS housed page protectors. That was the only workaround I had for wanting to use page protectors. I looked here at my local office supply for page protectors the same size as the album page but had no luck.

Ron, that's exactly what I thought would happen. If the page protectors were the same size as an album page it would be nice. I've been thinking of doing something to protect the paper around the holes, but I don't want to use those little circular reinforcements.

Leo, I've never had any problems with the holes in the page protectors ripping out.

Yet...

I've found them to be pretty durable.

So far...

(I just realized that I misunderstood which holes you were trying to protect. You are talking about the Mystic pages, right?? My brain sometimes doesn't work all that well...)

Yes, the Mystic pages. That's OK,,, happens to me all the time!

Try attaching a 3/4 " strip of Construction Paper or Manila Paper over the holes, then punch out the holes. Attach with glue-stick.
Art

Correct me if I'm wrong but in my experience identifying paper by weight is entirley unreliable. You can have two 80 lb. papers and one is twice as thick as the other. I've been using gsm (grams per sq. meter?) to identify the weight and/or stiffness of paper.

I just finished moving my entire collection into Mystic Hingeless Album pages. I really like not having to cut my own mounts (I thought this would be fun, but it ain't for me!). It was a lot of fun moving the stamps as I took a lot of time reviewing the stamps and enjoying the stories behind them.

Having fun is the whole point of stamp collecting.