No More Commercial Albums For Me ...

As the title said no more commercial albums for me. I like the look of Scott Int. but too much cheap stamps are missing spaces. Also their binders, all true very beautiful, they are not good quality. I'm also tire to have over 10 catalogues around. I try since 14 years to get use to plastic protectors, they are very easy to work with but they don't look as good as real paper albums. My favourites look is the Scott Brown Albums, but they are not practical to use especially with mounts and the copy available already show sign of acidity deterioration.



So here the deal



I ordered 5000 sheets of paper the size of Scott int. with holes already punch at the same location of Scott Int.
I may be use Scott Binders or the one of Unitrade (modify to accommodate the Scott pages ) the Unitrade are less than $ 20 Canadian and can by purchase locally , so no shipping, but it's just not the same look.

I want it as technical reference, So watermark drawing will be included on the pages, drawing that how the difference between a die 1 and 2, as example. Perforations, paper, all stuff that make the Scott catalogues useless to carry around. I will also remove some stamps like the Canada # 32, it's a $ 250k stamps and the only difference with another one is the paper, so a reference only will be included. Another exemple are the first Hungarian stamps, they are litho and some over $ 100 , I don't plan to pay for litho stamps, so I will include only 1 copy and make a reference to the other. If ever I get hands on them, I will just reprint the pages and looses few $ on the mounts.



So finally it will be a kind of more detailed Scott catalogue with real stamps in it.

Hi area66

I am totally in agreement with you.

When I started collecting, about 9 or ten years old, my aunt bought me a Minkus album. There was a stamp dealer in town who mentored kids on Saturdays in the art of stamp collecting. He said to get rid of the albums and use blank quadrille pages (his collection was that way). I listened.

For the past 50+ years I have used blank quadrille pages exclusively (no commercial albums). The pages are heavier than commercial albums and I can mount anything I wish on the page. My collection is for 3 countries so it is sort of specialized. Therefore, on a single page I may have the common stamp, a few varieties and/or a cover. Everything, mint or used stamps, covers, etc. are in Showgard mounts.

On occasion I have had to re-mount a page or two due to additonal items acquired. As they say, "do not sweat the small stuff". To me the cost of a page and the mounts is negligible. In all the years I rarely have had to remount a page.

Jerry B

Thanks Jerry, here circle in red are the kind of info I want to include on the pages






I do have all the softwares to design my pages, LibreOffice Draw, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, EzStamp with all the countries, AlbumGen






I also have the Steiner Pages in PDF and also in Pagemaker up to 1999 , and of course PageMaker , it's more easy with PageMaker, you just make a change of borders on the master and the other pages are done. But PageMaker don't run on Windows 7 and Up, I run it in Virtual with Vmware Workstation, so I can paste and copy from Windows 10 to XP

I too am fed up with the quality of Scotts binders. I use these 12x12 D-ring binders made for scrapbooking:


I go a bit further with my steiner pages for foreign countries. I too have the pagemaker files. Since I am on Macs I can open them into Adobe Indesign CS3 on my old Mac, update the stylesheets. Once I've saved the file I can then move them over to my new Mac running the latest Indesign CC.

If I really want to get fancy, I then add stamp images and any varieties not included in the pages. Here's a sample of my Newfoundland pages done this way:







I have my local copy shop digitally print these on 65lb cover Cougar Natural which is archival. I use split-back mounts. The newfoundland pages were my "experiment" to develop the design and production. Right now I'm producing pages for US Revenues that aren't covered by Scott. Here's a link to the thread over in US BOB:
https://goscf.com/t/47361

I saw you revenue page with the big drawing in the middle , ( I have them save on my desktop ) I must say it's the thing that put the nail on coffin of the commercial printed albums for me. The province one are very nice too. Davo 2 posts binders will be the best option for my project, they are very strong, I'm waiting for a price from a local dealer. It will cost me twice the price of Scott binders but it's way better.

Southpaw, those pages are absolutely GORGEOUS. You illustrate perfectly what can be done with a good word processing/publishing software and a bit of personal creativity.

When I returned to collecting back a couple years ago I switched to storing my collection in Lighthouse Vario stockpages. Saves cost of mounting and allows me arrange my collection as I see fit. No may not have as much information per page on the stamps, but if I wanted to include more info like that it would not take much to rearrange pages to do so. Since I collect worldwide I have rather -eclectic- tastes as to what I collect, but with good specialized overseas catalogs, my excel spreadsheet to plot out stamp positions on the pages, and a bit of time, I have already created albums for most of my French colonies and their post colonial successors, as well as for my USA based of the Scott Specialized.

Also designing your own pages is a fun project to do when funds require you to temper your purchasing of actual stamps, giving you time with the hobby through another channel.

Pre-printed album pages are great for some, but the freedom you get from designing your own, be it on paper or stock pages, I think really adds another dimension to the experience of being a collector. But that is just me.

I agree. I hope you're not going to put stamps in there and ruin those beautiful pages

Seriously, beautiful work and thanks for showing that binder; I like it. Do you buy those online or locally? Any idea of the name/brand/model, etc.

KirkS

They are artwork, very inspiring.

One thing, I work 3 nights a week and I mainly waiting hours for upgrade to finish on servers, so I do have at least 4 hours to work on my pages per night at work.

You people need to stop giving me ideas and more projects!

Those are very well thought out and well done

area66, I think you are on to something there!

Southpaw (Randall), your pages are simply beautiful!

I too have started going down this direction after becoming too frustrated with the Scott International. I will likely add info regarding the technical aspects of the stamps as well, but I'm also interested in the historical aspects of the countries too.

Right now I'm just printing on 8.5" x 11" paper and placing back to back in page protectors. This is the most economic way, but I would rather find a way to print on larger nicer paper, just afraid the costs will then balloon out of control.

area66, would you mind giving us a ballpark idea of what this cost?

Will you be using Scott Int binders or Davo 2-post binders? Davo binders are really nice and I like them, but you lose the flexibility of adding/moving pages around when using a 2-post binder as compared to a ring binder format. Also, the pages won't lay flat.

area66 - another question - where did you order the blank Scott International sized paper from? I've seen a few vendors offer it on ebay but haven't found any ongoing source.

Thanks,
Paul

Chris

You don't lose flexibility, just time! I don't mind Davo, but they don't have Schaubek capacity. But I assume Schaubek are too small to take the quasi-Scott pages?

Geoff

southpaw,

May I ask where you get your stamp images? The appear not to be just copied from a catalog or stamp album. I assume you have these pages printed by a commercial printer with a laser printer? Otherwise using inkjet would cost a fortune.

Paul, I ordered from a Canadian Online Paper store, in US you have way more choice, but as you see on this page they ofer to cut it the size you want and drill the holes , it cost very few $ more and cost way less than real Scott paper

This is not the one I ordered, it's just an example