Q Is For Quality

This thread inspired me to post two of my favorite pages from the U.S. (used only) section of my Scott International Part One. None of the individual stamps are as nice as the examples shown above, but I loved completing these pages.

revcollector, I finished one year ago.

Thanks to getting about half the series including the $1 and the 20 c free, it cost me about $40 to finish. And I have been giving away parcel posts and still have about 8 xtra 1c & 2c and an xtra 15c.

Beautiful

Nice collection, Rustyc! Thanks for showing your album pages.

Almost finished with this section for my collection . . .

No reflection on the stamps shown in this thread, but just generally speaking, I would posit that for these and many other back-of-book series, completing a set of sound, well-centered, nicely canceled USED stamps is considerably more difficult than mint.

Gotta get a Q8 close-up in here. The first postage stamp to show an airplane:

Very much agree

Rustyc, thanks for sharing. It's always a pleasure to behold completed pages.

Oracle of Delphi, that's a Mystic hingeless album right? By the way, it's beautiful, and will look terrific when completed. I personally prefer mint stamps to used, partly because they have more monetary value, but in general I like to see the whole undisturbed design as fresh as when first printed. Cheering you on to completion!

Hey classic coins, just an fyi. According to the Scott's Specialized catalogue, the CL2, and Air Post Semi-Official stamp issued in 1911 is the first stamp in the world to picture an airplane. Your beautiful parcel post was issued in 1913.



Privately issued by Rogers Aerial Post. According to Scott's there are 13 known copies, and they catalogue (2012) at $55,000 unused.

Ya, I don't have one either.

Thanks, jamesw. I guess I shouldn't believe everything I read on the Internet.!

themachine99 - thanks for your comments. It is a Mystic album. On another thread I noted that the pages of my Mystic hingeless albums were displaying severe curling and that I was moving to another brand, but their BOB hingeless album is holding up better, maybe because its of more recent vintage and they've made some improvements in their production process.

As far as collecting mint versus used, having recently returned to collecting, I'm more interested in seeing the complete design of each stamp, as you apparently do. Maybe when I've run out of spaces to fill (or my budget gets constricted), I'll turn to collecting harder-to-find or interesting sound used varieties to enjoy the challenge of that chase and learning more about cancellations and other postal history.

Of course used examples can have their charm.
These two are used in the first half of 1913.




And these four are used outside the continental US at the US Postal Agency in Shanghai China, San Juan PR, Ponce PR, and Iditarod AK.