Collecting The First 100 Years - Scott Intl. Junior Album

I am a newcomer to the Stamp Community Forum and initiating this topic to exchange information with fellow collectors interested in the worldwide stamps of the first 100 years. I was invited by a fiend to participate on this site as it apparently has a number of worldwide collectors.

I started collecting stamps as an 8-year without any specific plan but simply by soaking stamps off envelopes. My serious worldwide collection started in 1987 with a Scott International Junior Album that I acquired at an auction - it was about 30% to 40% full then (I did not catalog it at that time so I don't have an exact count). Over the past 25 years I have scoured stamp auctions. ebay and other sites, and dealer web sites, and attended many stamp shows in my attempts to acquire get the other 60-70%. I have now reached a point where I am missing only a handful of stamps to have a complete collection. The two stamps I have been searching for over the last many years are Cape Juby Scott#48-49 (Edifil #64-65) - I would welcome any suggestions on where I could find these. Also, I recently realized (when my friend asked me about how I acquired Syria Scott 106a) that I have the wrong stamp in that space in the album - which has led to the realization that there may be some others where the spaces may be filled with the wrong stamps. Nevertheless, I believe the collection is over 99.9% complete.

In 2002 I started a comprehensive cataloging of the collection and have counted 33,167 stamps (please note that there are no U.S. stamps in this collection as I have a separate large US collection).

I have been asked a number of questions regarding my experience in assembling this massive collection. I hope to answer some or all of these questions in future posts on this topic in this Forum. Some of the questions are:

1. Why did you choose the Scott International Volume 1 to house your collection? did you consider other options such as Minkus Master Global or the Scott International Brown?

2. When did you start the collection? How did you initially go about trying to fill the albums?

3. How many binders do you use, and what is the edition date of your Scott Junior albums?

4. Does your collection have unused stamps, used stamps, or a mix of both types? How do you place your stamps in the albums - hinges, mounts or a combination?

5. Do you maintain a checklist of what you have? How? and did you develop a want list of what you needed when you went about trying to fill the spaces?

6. What method did you use/do you recommend to build this type of collection - for example, did you start by buying worldwide collections, and then move on to individual country/area specialty albums, and finally to buying individual stamps?

7. Do you have a feel for the cost of building a complete Scott International Volume 1 collection?

8. How would you characterize the last few thousand stamps you acquired? At that stage were they mostly uncommon and comparatively expensive OR even towards the end were you still missing some readily attainable stamps that you simply had gotten around to acquiring.

9. Were there any countries, sets or individual stamps that were particularly difficult to find?

10. What do you do about stamps from 1840-1940 that you have acquired but for which there aren't spaces in the album?

11. Do you have any other collections? What are they?

12. What are you going to do with the albums when you have all the spaces filled? Are you going to continue to collect in other areas?

13. What advice do you have for people in early stages of filling their Volume 1 album?

14. What would you do differently, if anything, if starting over?

These are all excellent questions, and, as I find time over the next few weeks, I shall try to answer them. In the meantime, I would welcome answers to some of these from fellow worldwide collectors, as well as additional questions from you for me.

I don't normally recommend taking advice from fiends, but if they are inviting you to join SCF they can't be all bad.


Welcome to SCF. I am not a world-wide collector, but stand in admiration of those dedicated collectors who do collect worldwide.

As a collector who is enjoying the challenge of completing the Scott International Volume 1, I'm very much looking forward to this thread. I am only at the 20,000 mark so strategies for building a collection of this sort are very much on my mind. And I would think it will be of interest to those who house their worldwide collections in other albums, be they Brown Internationals, Vintage Reproductions, the Minkus Master or Supreme Globals, the old Stanley Gibbons Ideals, or William Steiner's pages.

I too am looking forward to this thread.

Drlimaye, I don't know if you have seen my blog...


Bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.com

There I do a country by country analysis of the contents of Big Blue. I have created a checklist ( so far up to Hong Kong) that lists the stamps allowed for a space based on date or stamp cut criteria.

Of course though, a collector can change the criteria if they wish.

Thanks for starting this thread!

Dear Jkjblue (Jim):
Thanks for your comments. I had looked your blog earlier but not in any great detail and had not realized the depth of information you hav e in it. Now I am going back and appreciating how much time and effort you have put into this country by country analysis. This is absolutely fantastic and I hope you will continue to find the time and devote the effort to complete it from Hungary (the next country after Hong Kong) to Zululand. When completed, Your research should be synthesized into a reference book!

Your research has now provided me with a "road map" to check if I have the "right" stamps in all the spaces in each country (recognizing, as you have pointed out, that there are options for collectors in many cases).

I have two questions for you:

1. Have you created a spreadsheet based on your individual country "simple checklists".
2. It would be very nice if you can also post how many stamps in your checklists you have in your collection. Would you consider doing that?
3. For future comments and questions, would you prefer that I use this Forum or respond on your blog?

Jim:
Looking at your blog, your first country is Aden. In my Big Blue (1945 vintage) the first country is Abyssinia (after the US and Confederate States pages which I have removed from the album)

Did you prepare a checklist for Abyssinia?

The '41/'47 editions have Ethiopia under "Abyssinia", but the '69/'97 editions have the country under "Ethiopia"

http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.co...thiopia.html

Thanks for the good questions drlimaye.

1. Unfortunately I don't have the checklist in spreadsheet format. But the checklist is located for each country in country's post, as well as a master checklist(s) available for Aden-Ethiopia and Falkland Islands-Latvia (In progress). See the left sided column for links.

2. I am certainly under 20,000 total, but that is a guess. I am publishing the posts as I put the stamps together from multiple feeder albums. So I literally have nothing to report other than what has been published so far. And I am not putting them in Big Blue, but "Deep Blue" the Steiner album pages- so it gets complicated. And that is something I would like to hear from you- what you do with the stamps that do not fit in Big Blue?

3. If the question could be of general interest to the SCF community, by all means use this forum - which I must say is a very nice place. If the question is quite specific, say, to the checklist, perhaps my blog might be more appropriate.

drlimaye - Frankly I'm a bit in awe in what you have done with (almost) filling Big Blue. So, I would like to ask some questions.


As I mentioned earlier, I would be quite interested in what you do for the stamps that you have acquired that do not have a space in Big Blue?

Thanks very much for this clarification.

Here's how I would answer the questions.

1. Why did you choose the Scott International Volume 1 to house your collection? did you consider other options such as Minkus Master Global or the Scott International Brown?

SI are the easiest to find. I wound up getting a SI part 1 from a collector that included a couple thousand stamps.

2. When did you start the collection? How did you initially go about trying to fill the albums?

I started in December 2007 I have 15,000 in my Part 1 and 75,000 total different through the present through 2012 in other binders of course!

3. How many binders do you use, and what is the edition date of your Scott Junior albums?

I use two binders for 1840-1940, with a copyright of 1947.

4. Does your collection have unused stamps, used stamps, or a mix of both types? How do you place your stamps in the albums - hinges, mounts or a combination?

Mint or used, prefer used. I prefer Dennison hinges, then fold o hinge.

5. Do you maintain a checklist of what you have? How? and did you develop a want list of what you needed when you went about trying to fill the spaces?

I go through box lots and collections and add that way. Sometimes I make a hasty list of numbers when I go to shows. I sometimes work at shows for stamps to put in my albums.

6. What method did you use/do you recommend to build this type of collection - for example, did you start by buying worldwide collections, and then move on to individual country/area specialty albums, and finally to buying individual stamps?

I'd buy box lots and collections with an eye to the most pre 1940 material in them. I collect through 2012 so I stumble upon a batch of older stamps now when I go through other lots.

7. Do you have a feel for the cost of building a complete Scott International Volume 1 collection?

It depends on how patient you are. If you have years to do it, you can probably find 30,000 different pre 1940 stamps for about a nickel apiece (granted you would buy in bulk to do this). Or you can plunk down about $1,500 on ebay for something close. Now complete with all the rares, 5 and 10 cent 1847 US you are talking about some real money. Of course condition would play a major part.

8. How would you characterize the last few thousand stamps you acquired? At that stage were they mostly uncommon and comparatively expensive OR even towards the end were you still missing some readily attainable stamps that you simply had gotten around to acquiring.

Tough to say. Get a US 1 and 2, or a 30,000 stamp collection you can have lots of fun going though.

9. Were there any countries, sets or individual stamps that were particularly difficult to find?

I haven't got to that point yet, but some dead counties seem to be tricky.

10. What do you do about stamps from 1840-1940 that you have acquired but for which there aren't spaces in the album?

add pages!

11. Do you have any other collections? What are they?

Non sports cards, wacky packages, hence my handle "landoquakes"

12. What are you going to do with the albums when you have all the spaces filled? Are you going to continue to collect in other areas?

Move on to the next album. I doubt I would ever have a PT 1 completely filled. Maybe a Part 5....

13. What advice do you have for people in early stages of filling their Volume 1 album?

Get one that already has some stamps in it!

14. What would you do differently, if anything, if starting over?

I would have loved to try it with the Minkus Supreme Global album. They are very elegant. I have come to appreciate all the empty space in the SI to put extra stamps in!

These are all excellent questions, and, as I find time over the next few weeks, I shall try to answer them. In the meantime, I would welcome answers to some of these from fellow worldwide collectors, as well as additional questions from you for me.

I guess my next major task will be to prepare a spreadsheet showing the spaces for each country, using your checklists as the basis. That will allow me and anyone else interested in the spreadsheet to catalog the stamps in the collection (and specify mint or used) and add cat value from the Scott Classic specialized catalog. I have been meaning to update the cat value of my collection and now plan to use the 2013 catalog to do so.

But one important issue is that everyone's Big Blue is not the same! So the spreadsheet may have to be customized by each user for his vintage of the BB.

Undoubtedly this is going to be a massive task and may take several years (I work more than full-time and my work involves extensive international travel; so finding the time to devote to my stamp collections is never easy!)

Fascinating topic... Being a large scale worldwide collector myself too (I'm trying to build up a used collection from 1840-2010, now going at 75,000+ items) , I find the progress of your collection intriguing. So basically you've build up from album with 6,000 classic stamps to 33,000 classic stamps in 25 years. That means roughly 1,000 new items per year if spread evenly - but I bet your progress was much faster at start, and then slowed down. Any changes of sharing at what point did your pace slow down significantly (adding less than one stamp per day) ?

Also, I'd be interested to know the ratio of used/mint material in your collection and how it is spread. I have a feeling that a majority of "common countries" (UK, Germany, Netherlands etc) material available is easiest to find in used condition, whereas the harder-to-locate exotic places are much more common in mint/unused condition.

Oh, and I'm also on the range of 15-20,000 classic items (I'm in progress of building a detailed index of my collection- current progress can be seen on my blog).

That would be fantastic!

My skill set does not include spreadsheets (I've never had to do that in my particular professional career), but I'm O.K.(and compulsive enough!) to create basic checklists.

By the way, my blog does note the differences in the editions under "Kinds of Blue" heading for the countries Aden-Ethiopia.

Beginning with the Falkland islands, and the "simple" checklist for the '69 and '97 editions, the feature was dropped.

But the overall differences in editions are less than 5%, usually on the the first and last pages. Often there are no differences for a country.

Perhaps you can teach me how to create blogs and I will help you with spreadsheets!

Great stuff landoquakes. I'm finding that buying large general
International collections yields some stamps for my albums, but there is now diminishing returns. Obtaining Country (or regional) collections looks like a good approach for me at this time.




I'm picking away and adding stamps gradually in some areas, but, like you, I doubt I will ever completely fill Part I. And I've also become interested in Part II (1940-49), the WW II years and aftermath.

The reality is I have no interest in learning how to do spreadsheets.

Age and Alzheimer's?

Blogs are highly addicting and will take up all your free time.

Danger ahead!

http://support.google.com/blogger/b...answer=41345