What Country Do You Wish You Were Collecting And Why?

Or one can do option 4 - use Lighthouse Vario pages and/or Stockbooks to organize your collection however you wish, including whatever you want and not be dependent upon the page design of others.

I agree option 4 works well if one can get past ready made albums.

I should mention option 5, the former 1840-1940 Scott international "Browns", now Vintage, in six volumes, now sold at Subway Stamps. We have three members of our local stamp club that use them.

I think I'd use a stockbook if I were to start a new country now, at least until I had a sizable portion of the country's stamps. I don't think I'll just print a whole country on a whim again.

I agree with Jim about the Vintage Reproductions. These are great albums, and I believe fall in between BigBlue and Steiner pages in terms of completeness and shelf space needed. They don't worry with perf varieties and have more stamps per page than Steiner. Also, I found that the number of binders suggested by Subway is a bit overkill – for example, instead of 3 Jumbo binders, you can easily get the pages into 2 Jumbo binders or instead of using Jumbo binders, the pages actually fit nicely into the Regular binders.

Of course, the downside is the price, but with 6 volumes, you can spread out buying them over time, like I am doing.

I just picked up a complete Blue 1840 - 1940 on ebay. I had a II and I am taking those pages and merging them with the I. This will give me a Big Blue to 1950. I have them in four jumbo binders waiting for stamps.

I also have stockbooks. A rather extensive and growing Greece collection is taking up two 32 page stockbooks.

Love this hobby.

Other options:

SG Imperial album in 2 vols - pretty comprehensive (British Guiana 1c magenta anyone?) for British Empire 1840-1936. Includes officials, dues and watermark and perf varieties. Fastbound, but SG is supposedly working on a loose-leaf option for today's more neurotic world.
SG Ideal album in 3 vols - foreign, 1840s-1936. Excludes dues and officials. Stamps generally in proper order of issue (ie charity and air mail stamps not artifcially segregated). Some watermark varieties, but not perf varieties. Fastbound.

Both of the above can be picked up at auctions or on ebay (in Europe, at least). Both are much more attractive than the efficient, but rather soulless, Steiner-type leaves. In addition, I think Schaubek and other manufacturers from continental Europe produced fairly comprehensive albums before WWII, although I don't have a complete example myself.

Geoff

India. I loved my two trips there, and really like the old stamps. I don't have the money to turn my focus away from my US collection.

TO BLCJR: if you enjoy aviation related stamps, you might want to collect the 1924 Airpost issue from Boliva and its overprints. They are beautiful engraved bicolor stamps.

I am a world wide collector as well and I do use Steiner pages but I only print them as I need them. I have over 100 countries sorted in boxes but only have 20 countries in Albums. I have about 56 binders so far. I usually work on 1 or 2 countries at a time and switch it up every two weeks or so.

So to answer the original question the country I would like to collect or should I say work on next is New Zealand.

Dianne

Spain, Italy, and Russia have used the kind of artwork I like, and their stamps reflect crazy, mixed up political histories, which also attract me to collect a place. Yet, I am too bogged down in French colonies and the German area to really delve into them at the moment.

I recently had two very nice meetings with an Italian collector (once 'in the flesh' as he was visiting his son and once via Skype) who has a wonderful worldwide collection, but an even better Venezuela collection (actually, five complete country collections plus the normal duplicates). It has prompted me to do Venezuela as my next country, especially since it's getting so hard to find more material to fill Denmark and Norway, my current countries.

Actually... What should I be looking for as a good reference catalog for Venezuela?

If you read Spanish, there is the "Venezuela, Catálogo especializado de estampillas 2009" by Aurelio Branco but not sure if there are newer editions or how available outside Venezuela it is.

http://www.asofilca.com/general/ven...elio-blanco/ is the blurb (in Spanish) about the release from the Philatelic Association of Caracas.

Thanks, I'll start looking for that one.

I collect Switzerland, France, Germany, Scandinavian states, Canada and USA. I have two specialized collections Victor Emanuel II, king of Italy from 1861 to 1877 und Campione d'Italia. both collections for Exhibition.