A Different Ww Stamps Album

area66 - what an immense undertaking! I am so impressed both by your stamina and balls to find your own route. Having even completed the exausting former East-block countries, well done. I still strive to understand - how on earth do you get time to deal with the stamps themselves, and not only generating album pages? I am personal on a opposite route, having dedicated various amounts of space for all issues until year 2000 in 160 x 64 page stock books. Not needing to say, this relatively limited amount of pages will require significant compacting of rather uninteresting issues, e.g recent 4000++ Guyana issues.... Thus in general leaving space for any 'interesting' stamp issued as per Scott Specialized Classical. Until today I had an idea that making a system for all world issues in stock books was a huge undertaking, but it sounds like peanuts compared to your personal venture with digital pages. And you are even offering to share your effort, I am taking my hat off! Best of luck. I'll stick with filling my stock albums, laid-back without hinges or mounts...
Jon

Ok, a little recap:
I start this tread about a different kind of WW albums, when you start a new project usually you have objectives, my objectives are;
Create a WW album that will contain a very good representation of stamp issue by the different countries.
Must contain singles copies; Souvenir sheet, bloc FDC can be add on blank pages.
Since it's a WW album some limits have to be establishing, such as cut-off of expensive stamps, using only 1 version of the same design (different watermark, paper, perforations will be keep at minimum).
Some of you and I have concern about the time it will consume to create a WW album
I do also have concern about the quality of the representation
Finding a cut limit is not easy and should be done case by case
A numbering system like Scott, SG, Mitchel can be an asset but can't be used on a published album without authorisation

So here what I came with;
I will not create this album alone and it will not be published, I already have a small group interested, so what we gone do is to split the work, members will work and their albums and we gone share the albums together, doing so have some advantages:
The albums will not be published or sold, so we can add Scott or whatever number under the stamps.
Since member will work on their area of expertize it will be more easy to choose witch stamps to exclude, witch series to group together.
Pages don't exactly need to be the same as they will be group by country
We do the countries we want.
Many of US already have Scott International Albums for at least the 1840-1940 part, so We will focus on the year 1940+ , this will also fix the cut-off limit, someone can use the Subway pages old Scott Brown Album or Steiner for the 1840-1840 and be able to have all the watermark variety as example.
Then why not use Steiner, the answer is clear and simple: Steiner pages don't have the single version of the stamps especially after 1980 (depends on country)

Simple; unless someone of the group what to do them, we will not have them. Thanks Blaamand for your positive contribution to the tread, I hope I answer few of your questions on my last post.

I applaud your efforts, Area66. If you're looking to turn this into a commercial endeavor or just plain want to help the most collectors you can, focusing on the most popular countries first is definitely a good way to go. If you do the US, British Commonwealth, Western Europe, China, Japan and probably a handful of others, you'll already have the most popular areas done and there will already be a sizable core of collectors who could potentially be interested. It's doubtful there are all that many collectors attempting to get all of the modern "wallpaper" issues and not having pages for them right off the bat probably won't be a consideration for most collectors.

I don't applaud your effort ,I think your trying to reinvent the wheel .Your going to get tired of making pages for yourself and a few others . Collecting to fill spaces in a blank album gets boring after a year or two ,especially if your spending too much time designing album pages .
Sure I seen hundreds of album pages design with all kinds of art work and nice write-ups of common stamps but the fact remains it was all done for the original owner and doesn't add one cent to the value of the collection . Now if you told me you were making pages for more specialized stuff like the Machin Heads or the German blue flea or pages for the reprints of Heligoland then I would applaud your effort ,but spinning off some common countries of the Steiner pages ,what can I say .

Thanks ArfulHinger, I can assure you, no commercial endeavour, the more I think of it the more I like the idea of sharing albums pages between a group.
Mainly all the world collectors I know have a Scott Int. Album, from 1840 to….. I was quite happy with mine except when I reach 1980 they start to have more and more souvenirs, So they are no rush to redo the 1840 to 1940 Pages of Scott. But they are in the project. What is important is to have pages for the stamps we get hands on. I focus on the 1840-1950 area, but when I purchase an album or lot, they are many stamps over the 1950. Also like engraved stamps, they still make real nice one after 1950.

What I like about this thread is how it demonstrates the so many different ways we approach albums. It got me to thinking about mine:

Vatican City Mint: Davo Hingeless
Israel, tabbed and untabbed: Palo Albums
US used, Haiti, newspaper stamps, and dead countries: Steiner Pages
Scouts on Stamps - Vario Pages
Judo on Stamps and a couple other small topical collections: Custom pages made on either Publisher or Word.

I think it also shows the futility of trying to find the "ultimate" album solution, and how our goal is to find the "closest" thing to perfect and then adapt it.

That may be the case, and it's highly unlikely I'm going to use his pages, personally. Few (if any) others may as well. But if he wants to spend his time working on album pages, I don't see anything wrong with it; it's not hurting anything. If he gets bored or frustrated with building endless album pages, that's on him.

Floortrader, who care about the value of my collection? not me for sure, I do it for fun and I really enjoy making albums pages. Value of the collection? lol, if I was so much about $$$ I wonder why I throw $ 1000 in flames when I launch high power rockets. I'm not like you I do understands that other persons have different tastes, but I'm not after special watermarks, re-entree, I just want have fun doing my pages and filling them. By the way don't like German and Heligoland stamps and my hand writing suck, so I will not put it on my pages..

Most of my time is spent between 1840-1945, but I thought quite a bit of the wallpaper issued around the world in the last 30 to 40 years was almost impossible to find used, or as individual stamps. Outside of the "popular" countries, are people really able to fill these spaces with used stamps?

Honest question...I haven't tried...

Yes. It's not even as difficult as one might think...

Area

On your proposed cut-off, you might consider going back three or four years. I say this because GB-based, and possibly other, collectors may tend to separate by reign. So the SG Ideal and Imperial albums, which are, as far as I know, the most comprehensive pre-WWII worldwide albums currently available (or just about available) run to the end of George V's reign - 1936. The worldwide gap then starts (although it's filled for Empire stamps by SG's George VI albums).

Geoff

Geofffha ; I will not cut-off at 1940, but I just give priority on the 1940 +

Every collector has his/her own preferences, and no one solution fits all. Collectors typically come up with their own solution. In my case, I actually like to have spaces for all issued stamps in my albums, even the ones that are clearly out of my budget range. It helps to frame the completeness of my collection. As I collect WW Classics to 1949, I don't have to worry much about souvenir sheets, which is a good thing.

I like my album pages to have stamps in chronological order of issue, not rearranged by similarity/design as Scott does. I thus use the Vintage reprints of the Scott Brown albums available from Subway Stamp Shop - those are in chronological order covering the period 1840-1940.

For the specialized parts of my collection, I design my own pages using free-of-charge AlbumEasy, available at www.thestampweb.com, which offers a Steiner template. If the Steiner pages have what I need then I use those even if they are based on the Scott catalogue. This works for me.

area66
Your ideas are very, very similar to my own aspirations, and so I joined the Community to dig deeper.
For a few years now I have been resurrecting and expanding my old childhood collection.
What a mess, in boxes of envelopes and mildewed old albums from the 1960s.
I decided to build a MS Access database, both to satisfy my longtime desire to learn database design, and to catalogue my collection. But, instead of mounting in albums, I want to store the stamps in 102 cards in glassine envelopes, in airtight plastic bins.
My intention is to generate flexible, user customizable reports in PDF of my stamps, so that I can view my collection digitally, and e-mail portions to friends, etc.
I have scanned several thousand stamps, at 600 dpm, nicely straightened and cropped, and added information such as height, width, selvidge dimensions, paper type, color, print type, etc, etc. I enjoy the completeness, but when I make the application public, all these details will be at the user's discretion.
Now, since Access can embed the images inside itself, as part of the database file, I can make the reports fairly easily....however, the file size grows enormous, and bogs down the processor. Now, I link the images on file, and they show very nicely in the user forms, but poorly in the reports.
So my intention is to generate xml scripts to export to a pdf file creator, but have only just started to research this...and stumbled accross this thread.
In summary, suppose I wish to select a "common design" set, such as 1935 George V Silver Jubilee. I can have the report query the database, for the top level (parent) of the set (I input this, as my preference when I enter the set data and stamps), then show all my inventory of Silver Jubilee stamps in my collection, sorted by Country. I would like to generate a xml script with appropriate text and positioning, as well as image paths.
Have you or anyone else any comments, or suggestions on this approach?