Stamp Pages

Are there any ready to print stamp template pages for all years? If not, how can I create my own?

Hello There, have you googled "free stamp album pages"? There are several out there that I know of, but you are not giving us much to go on. What country do you collect or are you looking for?

Peter

Some folks have posted this question before, and one of the website was mentioned today. Try www.albumpages.net

Peter

www.stampalbums.com costs $30 for access to printable pages for virtually every country and every major stamp ever issued as listed in the Scott Catalog.

I am mostly looking for US and Canada. I recently got 5 boxes full of WW stamps and most of them are U.S. And Canada. Is there a website that I can just print the templates rather than buy them?

A wise man once told me: "The only thing free in life is advice, and then you get what you paid for."

Be very wary downloading "free" album pages. "Free" is an internet euphemism for "loaded with spyware and tracking cookies". Taking that warning to heart, follow Peter's suggestion and google "free stamp album pages". Also visit the American Philately Society web site. They offer several free pages: 2008 - 2014 US issues, and several topical collection pages. The American Air Mail Society also offers free US Air Mail pages on their site. Both APS and AAMS pages are in PDF format and safe to download (I have both).

Edited for typos.

Hello Hello There,

Basically your choices are between (1) consistent and completely comprehensive pages on the one hand, (2) inconsistent mish-mash selective free internet pages, (3) selective and consistent but big bucks preprinted pages.

Consistent and completely comprehensive print-your-own pages for the whole world (6500 pages just 1840-1940, many more thousands of pages for 1940 onward) come from William Steiner ("Steiner pages") at www.stampalbums.com. The pdfs for the whole world 1840-the present cost $30.00 as a one-time purchase/subscription. Ongoing subscription for updates (future years' issues) are possible.

That's the one choice--a space for every major number in the Scott Catalogue system. The Steiner pdfs are inexpensive but you bear the cost of paper and ink and binders, which adds up fast. The 1840-1940 Steiner pages printed out take up about 20 linear feet of shelf space. The pdfs are designed for 8 1/2 x 11 or A4 paper, smaller than traditional "album" paper. You can, of course, have them printed onto larger "album" paper but they'll still only take up 8 1/2 x 11 space.

[Steiner leaves out a very few stamps worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least in the US section; I haven't really examined the other 6500 pagers for that issue.]

The Scott Speciality albums are comprehensive but each covers only one country (or group of countries). They would be a sort of pre-printed version of Steiner pages with more ornate layout than Steiner (whose pages are very simple) but very expensive and many countries are no longer available. (Amos Advantage owns the reproduction rights.)

Steiner pages have no pictures, only descriptions. But because they follow Scott catalogue order in most cases, they are pretty easy to use even without having pictures. Palo Albums take the Steiner comprehensiveness and add pictures. But they also are very expensive. Not a likely choice for a beginner.

On the other hand, there's (2) the myriad of choices you get from searching for free stamp album pages or something similar. This will leave you with inconsistent mishmash and some of them carry the risk of spyware as pointed out above. You also bear the cost of paper, ink, binders.

In addition, all sorts of SCF people design their own pages--search SCF for those threads.

Steiner pages will leave the beginner with lots of empty spaces, with hundreds, even thousands of pages that have no stamps at all or only a stamp or two on them. To avoid that you could selectively print only those pages for which you have stamps-you have the pdfs and you can print out what you want when you want, out of those tens of thousands of pages.

(3) A third option are the selective preprinted albums. They leave aside the expensive stamps, so you have a much better chance of "filling" those pages. The Scott Blue Internationals, the Minkus Globals, the Harris albums (no longer printed but used copies on www.ebay.com/b/260/" rel="nofollow">ebay).

The Scott Vintage Reproduction "Browns" (sold by Amos Advantage) are not selective in the above sense but are selective in that they only go to the 1930s--they are like the Steiner in comprehensiveness but unlike Steiner come preprinted and sometimes even hardbound. On the other hand,Steiner has pages all the way to the present And of course the selective albums (Scott Internationals, Minkus Globals etc.) cost money, much money. But you will pay a good bit of money for paper and ink for "do-it-yourself" Steiner or "free" Internet pages.

(1) Selective preprinted versus (2) comprehensive space-hogging DYI versus (3) mish-mash/you select DYI versus (4) design your own. Them's the choices.

There are threads on all of this on SCF.

I know Hello There asked about templates, not specifically about sets of complete pages.

Starting with a template and modifying it is one option, of course. But I'd say it ends up being the same as designing your own--any template would have to be modified in an infinite number of ways. So a template is helpful but only a slight advantage over design your own from scratch.

So search for "design your own pages"" threads and the various software/template options will be described there.

One thing to keep in mind is that designing your own, whether from a template or from scratch is going to be a work in progress. It's impossible not to have to redo a page design, probably many times. This is not a problem if you have not mounted stamps, but the trouble is that only as you mount stamps on a page will you discover design features/problems that you hadn't thought of. Remounting stamps quickly becomes time-consuming and expensive.

If designing your own or modifying from templates gives one enjoyment, by all means forge ahead. There are threads full of advice. But it's worth, at the outset, coming to terms with the amount of time and effort and money that goes into getting the bugs out as compared with buying preprinted albums/pages or using an already debugged set of pages (Steiner).

It is possible to modify/customize the Steiner pdfs, of course. Again, threads on SCF give the details. Doing so does take time and energy but for those who enjoy that sort of work, more power to them. Just don't underestimate the amount of energy and time it will take to correct the bugs you introduce by thinking you can improve on someone else's design. You may well be able to improve, but you also may introduce new problems that you only recognize later.

THen there's stockbooks. They avoid the problems noted above. Have their own problems, of course. We always have to choose between the good and the perfect. Choosing the perfect ensures endless frustration, so one might as well choose the good, knowing its imperfections.

Don't forget this thread - endlessly useful:

https://goscf.com/t/11268

And don't forget that you can buy quadrille pages, a ruler and a pencil and make exactly what you want yourself!