A Different Ww Stamps Album

I'm working on doing a World Stamps Album similar to Steiner ( I means the distribution ) but more focus on my and others real need, this is not something I throw like that, I already start )

Here some issues I read ;

Scott International has so many missing issues
Scott International are print on both sides
Steiner can have more stamps on same page to save binders
Steiner as sometime 1 BOB on 1 page
Steiner don't always group series together
Steiner contain stamps with too much high value
Steiner has many mistake, wrong stamps orientation, wrong size ….


So what are your criteria for the perfect most universal World Stamps Album ?
What will be the cut off limit for high value stamps?
Would it be nice to have a print of expensive one ?

For now what I have put in my criteria is this :

Souvenir sheets, Se-tenant ; they can be a problem for peoples who collect used stamps, so I'm thinking to include 2 version of those pages; 1 with the sheet and the se-tenant and a second one with only single stamps.

Watermark and Grill , I don't see the use to have 2 or 3 time the same stamp with only difference watermark we can't see and some time a real pain to find ( here again 2 styles of those pages can be included )



US very expensive stamps ; If a stamps has the same design for a stamps at $2000 and one at $1 , I don't see why we can't omit the expensive one.

Ok let's ear your tough

Why reinvent the wheel? The amount of time invested in the Steiner pages is immense--you are likely to get part-way and fizzle out.

I"m not sure whether you envision this as something for you yourself alone or whether you are announcing it as something you expect others to get on board with. If the former, then, of course you should do whatever you wish to do with your time and energy and money.

You wrote "Watermark and Grill , I don't see the use to have 2 or 3 time the same stamp with only difference watermark we can't see and some time a real pain to find ( here again 2 styles of those pages can be included )."

Okay, you don't think watermarks are that important. That's perfectly fine. But other people do. If this project is for you alone, no problem. Leave watermark variants out. But you seem to be offering it as something others would use. In that case, many of them would want to collect variant watermarks. That's why Bill Steiner simply followed SCott. Of course, by choosing Scott over Michel or Gibbons, he immediately made his pages less interesting or useful to European and British Commonwealth collectors. I'm not suggesting you or anyone can please everyone, merely pointing out that choosing criteria has to be done with some fairly firm idea of the potential user-pool in mind.

As far as errors in the Steiner pages are concerned, simply send corrections to Bill Steiner. He is glad to correct errors.

While it might seem like shelf space could be saved by avoiding half-empty or three-fourth's empty pages, I'm guessing that the amount saved would be negligible, perhaps a few inches of shelf space. At the very least one ought to do some counting to get a quantitative grasp of how much would be saved.

Besides, the half or three-fourths empty pages are sometimes useful for placing stamps that don't quite fit anywhere else.

You are imagining something ten times more difficult than what Bill Steiner did. He simply followed the Scott catalogue system. You are talking about being selective, leaving out some stamps--you are asking us about what criteria to use in your selectivity.

As a former professional editor, I'm guessing you may not realize how complicated this gets. You start out with some criteria and operate according to them, then you realize that one or two aspects of them don't really work. If you modify your criteria, then you have to hunt down all earlier instances and change them or leave the inconsistency. THen later you realize that even your revised criteria don't work so well. Then you start getting confused about your criteria, forgetting one here or there.

It's difficult in advance to anticipate all questions and problems that will arise, so it's next to impossible to develop a set of criteria for editing, including, excluding. At the very least one has to have a system of keeping track of where one employed which criteria so that one can backtrack and correct as the criteria solidify and get refined.

A potential exists for errors and inconsistencies to creep in to your pages that would far eclipse those found in Steiner's pages, esp. now after 15 years or so of correcting and refining his pages.


Scott Internationals, despite all the faults that Jim Jackson and Bob Skinner have documented so thoroughly, at least had a set of criteria and 50 years or so of fine-tuning going for them. Starting out from scratch is asking for huge headaches.

And to what end? Most collectors have compromised one or more of their "druthers" and adopted one of the albums or album systems. Specialists in a few countries can, quite reasonably, design their own pages and albums--more power to them. But designing a worldwide set of album pages from scratch ??? Wouldn't you really rather spend that time, energy and money with stamps themselves?

If Bill Steiner hadn't already done it and if all the other options did not exist, well, an audacious and daring person might well give it a try. But now that we have Steiner ????

By all means keep thinking and imagining, but consider some of the issues I raise here. I don't do it to deflate your dream but to try to make it realistic, as much as one can be realistic in advance.


Addendum: William Steiner,of course,while following Scott, did make choices on some occasions to include Scott minor number variants, though in most cases he only included major numbers. So even "simply" following Scott is not mindlessly automatic. But once one decides to be selective about grills or watermarks or perforations found in Scott (or Michel or Yvert), the complexity increases immensely.

Well, there's perfect solutions and then there's workable solutions. The perfect solution would probably be having multiple versions of the pages for different purposes. I like the idea of separate used (i.e. single) and mint (i.e. joined se-tenants and blocks). There could also be a "comprehensive" option for those who want a complete collection and a "representative" option that excludes stamps over a certain amount. If I were trying to build a representative collection, I'd probably be put off by too many stamps with a CV over $10 or $20, with maybe an exception here or there for a particularly popular or beautiful issue, etc. For a representative collection like Scott's Internationals, you'd probably want to aim for at least 50% coverage, with the bulk of them of course being common, low-cat items.

Honestly, the most perfect solution would be a customizable one, where you could go down a checklist of stamps and sets and tell it which ones you want and whether you want blocks or singles, how many you want on a page, etc. and presto! it makes the pages for you on the fly. It's certainly doable. The kicker is inputting data (including physical dimensions, denominations, catalog numbers, etc) on, oh about a million or so stamps.

Setting up dollar amounts as a criterion for representivity works as a general principle but any collector will, before long, be gifted, happen upon, discover in someone's attic some stamp that exceeds the cutoff line and then say to himself, "Now, what do I do with this." The editors of the Scott Internationals didn't follow strict monetary cutoff lines--Jim Jackson and Bob Skinner have shown that thoroughly. They can be faulted for inconsistency--it's hard to figure out what criteria they used, but if they had been absolutely consistent on dollar amounts, we'd be complaining about that too.

Artful Hinger wrote: "The perfect solution would probably be having multiple versions of the pages for different purposes." Well, the Steiner system permits that--just print extra pages. I often do that where I have double mint/used for most of a large series of stamps.

"the perfect most universal World Stamps Album" will never exist. Everything is a compromise. My choices on where to compromise would drive you crazy and vice versa.

If I was going for paper and couldn't live with Steiner I would scan in Internationals and then use a software solution to customize them before printing them out one-sided on a heavier paper stock. Obviously, this is a personal-use solution, as you couldn't circulate your work product.

For myself, I would have a cutoff date around 1945, and I still can't imagine the enormity of the task.

Not to puncture a balloon, but do you know what you are getting into?

Steiner, for WW, has 80,000 pages developed.

The Steiner classical WW era (1840-1940) has 6,500 pages.

That, my friend, is a lot of labor and time.

As far as presentation, the Steiner generally follows the current Scott catalogue- hard to argue with that- what would you do differently?

Now, here are some ideas for the "ideal" general WW album - at least for 1840-1960 or so...

A) Combine what is now covered in the Scott International (Big Blue) and the Minkus Supreme Global albums. (You will need to do an album inventory evaluation.)

B) Then consider, and possibly add stamp spaces to the album with CV $10 or less.

C) Because of space considerations, double-sided pages on good quality paper should be a strong consideration.

The reality is there is no "ideal" album for everyone, as we all have our own ideas of what is important.

One example....

You mention you don't see a reason to worry about watermarks. I happen to like watermarks.

But, if you have the ambition and the ability, and you have a realistic view of the challenges, then go for it!

Hieronymus, after read your comments I wonder if you have actually worked with Steiner's pages. Let's clarify few things, Bill work on quantity not quality, as example Canada; Canadian pages are very popular, you should not be negligent , I will give you an example of mistake ; the "Wildlife Definitive" a very popular series Scott # 1687-1694 , so if Bill fallow the sc #, why he spreed it on pages from 1997 to 2005 ? Scott group them together not him, the reason is that he already finish the pages of 97 when the realize new issues later.

Here what I intent to do ; I do it for my self, but if it can help other why not, they will be free distributed in PDF and Libre Office format, so anyone can modify it. I manage a Data center so storage and bandwidth are not a problem for me. But you will still need to register to get them.

No commitment, I do it at my rhythm. For now; US , Canada, Czechoslovakia, Philippines, Hungary, Sweden are nearly finished. I'm not sure if Steiner is a collector, I'm one, so I like to test my pages with real stamps to see if the size of rectangle match.

I do expect some peoples will joint and help me my to design pages I'm less familiar with.

Jkjblue, I already have the Scott Int. up to 1990 The Brown one too , Minkus Global up to 1970 ( that was my album in the 1970 before I switch to Scott in the 80. And yes I know what i'm getting in.

While there are things here and there about Steiner's pages that I may choose to change, he charges a very minimal amount, so it doesn't really rise to the level of a complaint in my book. Subscribing to his site was among the best money I've ever spent in my entire life, on anything. I suppose if I could really fix Steiner, it would be to insert images and Scott numbers, but then people would probably complain about using too much ink in printing them.

I don't complain, I'm not satisfy with what on the market, so instead of complain I take the thing in hand. If you not happy , you do it yourself ....

You can't include Sc#, without their permission, images, I will have on my pages real scan of my stamps, here again you can't copy images without permissions. I wonder why peoples have not yet figure to start a new # system. like US-1 US-2 .... it will be so simple to release anonymously a cross reference pdf files on the web after......

area66,


I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Have you seen this software:
http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopi...98&hilit=xml ?

There are already more people working on/with it. It gives you the option to customize what you want. A different approach than 'just' manually creating 1000s of pages in Indesign etc.

I will check it at home, I don't have java installed at work

Ideally, your pages should support any and every catalog numbers. One person might like to add Scott numbers while another SG numbers. Does this imply that you must negotiate licensing with these companies and then support multiple versions? No, there is a slick work-around.

Since you are distributing in PDF format it is assumed each user will be printing their own album pages. A PDf file can be 'data connected' to a data source such as a Access MDB or XML file. For those users who want a catalog number assigned to each stamp on every page, supply a template file which they can populate with whatever numbering system they desire. When the PDF is opened, it will look for that data connection. If it is there, it will automatically populate the page with the catalog numbers from the file.

I've built a PDF file (using a Steiner page) that does just this and it was fairly straight-forward. Licensing issues are avoided since you aren't distributing the product with them included, it simply supporting the addition of catalog numbers.
Don

We really don't need a fourth set of worldwide pages. Having spend 40 years with Scott Internationals ,it was a real mind-blower to finally use and print my own set of country albums with the Steiner software . The few problems with Steiner pages were easy to correct or work around .
I believe one of the major stamp companies will try or is trying to buy out the Steiner Pages operations ,because that is the future of W.W. collecting .

They are absolutely no need for Scott # in a 2015 Stamps Albums, actually even Scott never use them in their world album, whatever it was the Brown , the Jr or the Blue, they use it only for the US section, in the beginning because they don't have the right to put a drawing of the US stamps ( actually not at a size practical for the album ) so they use Sc # instead, later they add drawing and continue to put the Sc# . If you look at a 1914 Scott catalogue US stamps was not even illustrated.

I notice a tendency for new peoples in this hobby to be spoon feed ( is that the right term )

Sorry Floor trader, there is a need for peoples who collect cancelled stamps, all the albums on the market have place only for new stamps and especially those souvenirs sheets. This is why I put the final nail on the coffin of using Steiner or Scott albums; I refuse to put money on those souvenirs sheets. Many of them are not stamps they are marketing posters to make more money. So I have to redo 75% of the Steiners pages after more or less 1980. It's so ridiculous to see a stamp album this days ; it start for the first 100 years with single stamps, then come the se-tenants and blocks and finally those posters , yes posters.