Stamp Pages For Perfins

Hi - I've recently been expanding and mounting material in my Australian collection. It's all housed on Steiner pages on white paper. It all looks great until I get to perfins. When mounted on the white paper, the perfins can be difficult to identify. Mounting them face down makes the perfin easy to see but not the stamp!

Has anyone run into this dilemma? I've considered black stock pages, but those take away from the consistency of the album. Mounts are another possibility, but the costs start to add up quickly. Most of the collection is mounted with hinges.

BTW - this is all part of a larger reorganization project. I've thrown out the "back of book" and other stamp types and reorganized my collection strictly by date - including covers. Before this point, most of the perfins were in envelopes waiting to be mounted.

I too find difficulties with displaying my GB perfins. I have poor eyesight anyway and finding a solution is still difficult. With some stamp colours such as red and orange the perfins show up nicely with a black background but darker colours like blue and green are very difficult. I have resorted to scanning the back of every perfin stamp and making it stamp sized when printed for cutting and placing alongside the actual perfin stamp. That way I can have the stamp as it is read from the front as it should be and also there is a clear image of the back next to it.

That's how I do it.

Robert

I have considered scanning the stamps from the back. Sounds like quite a bit of work, yet with modern smart phones, I may be able to create pages without too much effort.

I just put them in Glassine envelopes back side out, and mount them on recipe cards (with data thereupon) and into the file cabinet.

It is not too much of a hassle to scan the backs of the perfins as dozens can be done in a batch. I'd expect it would be suitable for hinged systems as the actual stamp is mounted normally and the scanned perfin back has nothing to be spoiled by hinging.

Hi,

Mine are mounted in 'clear' Vario pages which have black sheets of paper interleaved, all in a 3-ringed binder. That way I can see the front of the stamp and when turning the Vario page the back shows the perfin against the prior black sheet of paper.

- stamporator -

Using my iPhone I snapped some photos of the perfins from the back. Using that image, I embedded it onto a modified Steiner page. Here is the result:



Adding the image to the page didn't add that much time to the creation of the page, and overall I'm happy with the result.

For those of you who have been modifying some Steiner pages, I have a copy of the PageMaker files from 2000 and run PageMaker 7.0 in a Windows XP Virtual Machine. It actually takes longer to startup and run the program than actually editing the files.