Collecting The First 100 Years - Scott Intl. Junior Album

Really enjoyed your story- and your early checklist use. I wonder how many comprehensive checklists were put together over the years by Big Blue collectors,but never published for others to use - and hence I've had to re- invent the wheel.

And congratulations on the 30,000 count! That puts you in select company indeed!

And some page scans or pics of your (almost filled) Big Blue album pages to share with us would be great!

Thanks, Jim. The 30,000 is a guesstimate. I just looked and the last time I had an actual count was Oct. 26, 1996. (Jeez - no way it could have been that long ago!) Anyway, I was at 355 of 357 entities and 23,817 stamps. When I posted, I was guessing that my last count was somewhere around 25,000 and that I must have added at least 5,000 since then. I'm probably in the ballpark.

I don't know if an International page will fit on my scanner, but I'll see what I can do when I get a chance. Picking a couple to scan will be a challenge.

Rustyc-----Thanks for that interesting story and congratulations on your attention to the hobby . A few years back I also set a goal of getting a stamp or a set from every country .That goal is now getting expensive ,it is not the South Sudan stamps recently issued but some of those issues nobody ever sees like .....Long Island , all the People's Republic of China Liberated Areas and places like the Black Flag Republic . There is a certain satisfaction to having a collection that you spend years putting together and that is what keeps me going is knowing my collection will be bigger and better next week and more so next year .

Rustyc, let me also thank you for sharing your experiences. I find it amazing that within the past week there have been three active threads here on worldwide collections: this one, "Vintage Reproduction Albums," and "Beginning a new classical collection."

The nice comments are much appreciated. Floortrader, good luck on reaching your goal. I must admit that Long Island (assuming it's not the one in New York) and Black Flag Republic are new ones to me. And 1840to1940, I too am amazed that many others share my interest in collecting worldwide and specifically in collecting the first 100 years.

At the request of Jkjblue, I am posting scans of a couple of representative pages from my Big Blue. What could be more fitting than Abyssinia to Zululand!

Nice presentation.

rustyc, nice scans.

Out of curiosity, at 30K stamps, do you have any pages that do not have at least one stamp on them? I've got 22K in my album and still have several dozen "lonely" pages.

rustyc- really nice!

There is nothing like a complete page.

And your black mounts nicely frame the stamps.

1840to1940 - My 1947 edition had perhaps as many as 10 pages for U.S. cut squares. Some or all of those would be blank, but I took them out long ago. Otherwise, I don't think I have any totally empty pages. But I have a couple of dozen, maybe more, with only 1 or 2 stamps. I think I made a conscious effort at some point to have at least 1 stamp on every page.

Floortrader,

any chance of seeing your Black Flag Republic stamps,

Pagoda

rustyc, I know there is a prejudice these days against cut squares, but I actually enjoyed completing the easier 1969 edition pages for US cut squares. Great fun. Incidentally, I like US revenues, too. Unfortunately, the 1969 edition omitted US revenues so I keep on looking for a set of pages with some stamps from the 1947 edition that I can add to my album.

1840to1940 -- my only prejudice against cut squares is their tendency to be not all cut to the same size. Unless I trimmed some, which I could never do, the pages would be a hodgepodge of different sized black mounts. At least that's what I imagined. I know I should see a therapist about this. I've actually thought about starting a collection of cut squares but keeping them on Vario pages. That's what I do with my revenues, where the imperfs and part perfs also can be in many sizes.