Value Of Stamps On Album Pages?

In sorting through the stamp collection I recently inherited from my father, I found that he had several envelopes containing individual or small groups of album pages with stamps. I'm curious as to the pros/cons of buying and selling stamps on album pages. Does the album page add any value to the stamps? Or is it that the seller didn't want to spend time unmounting the stamps, which I could well understand for hinged stamps but not so much for the hingeless pages I found.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
-Jim

I have bought stamps that were mounted on pages, so far I have found the value to be that I dont have to mount them. I can just add the pages into whatever storage device I am using for that country. As for monetary value... No. No added value. I will eventually put them on my own pages and get rid of the ones used for shipping.

Bear in mind that your father will have bought them in a pre-internet period when the vast majority of stamp buying was 'live' with a dealer. If you have a table at a fair covered in stamps the easiest way for a customer to search through and handle the stamps is if as many of them as possible are attachedd to full sheets, which can be piled up across the stall.

Unless the stamps are otherwise labeled somehow, I would prefer to buy them still on the pages. I'll most likely remove and remount them, but having them still on the page makes it easier for me to find the corresponding pages & spaces in my own albums. If they're just loose in glassine envelopes and not labeled, it can take me a lot longer to find the right place to put them, particularly on some issues that look alike. If the glassines or cards are labeled with catalog numbers, that would actually be better than having them on pages. Either way is fine with me, as long as they're organized somehow.

The other thing is, if you want to sell them on ebay, taking pictures of album pages is probably easier than photographing or scanning in stamps individually. Buyers on ebay are used to seeing collections offered this way as well, so I don't think there's a lot of downside to leaving them on the pages.

Edited to add: it also depends somewhat one the appearance of the pages. Are the stamps mounted neatly and do the pages look well-arranged and attractive? Or is the page crammed with stamps that appear to be mounted haphazardly? Presentation is a key aspect of selling. If you have an "adult" album (for lack of a better term) made by a major manufacturer such as Scott, Lighthouse, Lindner, etc, chances are the pages look nice and the stamps can be sold on the pages. If it's more of a beginner album (such as made by H.E. Harris), the stamps tend to be more crowded and the pages (and therefore the stamps) may not look as attractive to serious collectors. In a nutshell, if they look good on the page, leave them there. If not, removing them is probably a good idea.

I buy many lots of stamps mounted on album pages. I remount the stamps and throw out the pages as they don't fit with my storage and display system. However, I do find these lots very attractive; as someone said above, the organization of the stamps on the pages simplifies the task of processing the stamps into my albums and more clearly shows what's there and what's missing. Do the pages add any value? Not to me, but they might very well be of interest to some collectors and I suppose it might depend on how clean and fresh-looking the pages look.

Thanks for your perspectives. They're all very helpful. So I'm thinking it'll most likely be okay to take the stamps off the album pages and incorporate them into the rest of the collection. I appreciate the guidance.

The coolest thing to me is buying a collection on old-time, homemade hand drawn pages. I bought a collection once on such pages and remounted the stamps in my own albums. But I still can't bring myself to throw those pages out. I'll likely never use them, but it just doesn't feel right to throw someone's work away when they obviously put so much time and effort into it.