Finally Got My Postal Stationary And Album Pages!

I finally received my Postal Stationary and Cut Squares Album and Album Pages. I am so excited.

This is the first album I have purchased from Scott and the quality of the binder and slipcase is great.

I can't wait to get started putting my small but ever growing collection in it.

Excellent. Of course, you know if you talk about it here, you have to post a picture

OK, here goes the pictures, hope they come out OK.

My Album and Slipcover:



One of the pages:



And just a small amount of the postal stationary and squares that I have:

Well done. Looks like you're well on your way.

Thanks for posting the pics.
Kirk

You have an excellent quality album and slipcover there, but I just question how you propose to mount your postal stationery material into it. Are you using hinges or mounts? Are you planning on cutting the material you have to size so they fit within the square block made available in the album for any given item? Or are you planning on keeping all of your postal stationery items in the form they are presently and simply disregard the size of the space allowed for in the album?

I only ask these questions because it looks like you have a lot of nice postal stationery items there, and it is often too easy to just take a scissors and cut them to the size allowed for in the album without any regard for the overall cover or piece.

Of course, any collector can do as they please with their collection, but as for my opinion, I would be especially careful to keep the cut squares, covers and postal cards just as they are. Sometimes the only way to identify a specific item or variety is to have the entire cover or postal card, or at least a large portion of it.

You also seem to have a nice First Day Cover, reply cards, miscut postal cards, and even a nice RPO cancel amongst the items you scanned. That material is nice just as it is, which is the very reason why I tend to use Vario pages (or similar) for storing this material, as the rigidity of a specialized album (no matter how nice) does not always lend itself to the best format for storing various sizes of postal stationery items.

I plan on keeping all the material "as is", not cutting anything and using Showgard mounts for the material. When I ordered the book, I also ordered a lot of blank pages for the back for the postal stationary that is in tact. I will mount those items with either Showgard Mounts or Acid Free Corner Mounts with a black background acid free paper.

I do use Lighthouse Stock Books for many of the items that I own (mainly my topical stamps). For my US collection, I use binders, acid free paper and acid free page protectors, and Showgard Mounts.

That was only a handful of the postal stationary/cut squares that I have, so I have a lot of work to do in identifying them and putting them into the book.

I hope that the above is acceptable. I am pretty new to stamp collecting, sort of, my father got me started when I was young, I just got back into it about 6 months ago.

One ore thing, what is an RPO cancel???

Thanks for your concerns.

RPO = Railway Post Office. The postmark is shown on the blue 1-cent McKinley postal card in your last scan. Some collectors specialize in these things. The postmark appears to be the Mendon & Centralia RPO (Illinois Central Railroad).

How interesting to know this. How do you get such a wealth of information? I need to learn more about these things.

This is probably the case with it being Illinois, because this came from my grandmother's home in Illinois (where I grew up) and I have had it for a long time.

Every hobby or field of study has it's own language, vernacular, and jargon -- you'll get there soon. Just keep reading and asking questions

Kirk

That is some pretty neat stuff! I have a binder and slipcase with this kind of stuff in it but it was a happy accident of sorts. I just ended up with a nice accumulation of postal stationary that I put in vario S2 sheets and in a binder. I hate to admit that I hardly open it.