Converting To Mystic Heirloom Hingeless

Hi all,
I have most of my U.S. stamp collection in the Harris Liberty albums and am thinking about switching to the Mystic Heirloom Hingeless albums. I read several posts on this forum, found a lot of useful information, and am optimistic about the Mystic hingeless albums.

I have a few questions that I hope you can comment on -

1. How's the selection of stamp coverage in the Mystic hingeless album, especially for the recent years, with respect to the Harris liberty albums? Will all of my stamps in the Harris albums have a home in Mystic hingeless albums? Are there pages for the full stamp sheets as well as individuals?

2. Where is the cheapest place to buy them - is Mystic the only option? $135/album is a bit steep. I couldn't find them for sale anywhere else on the web.

Thanks for your time!

Casinoboy3,

Welcome to SCF. I made the migration from Harris Liberty to MYSTIC's Premium (not hingeless) two years ago and have never regretted taking the plunge. I chose not to use the hingeless because I wanted to use black-backed Showgard mounts. The collection is complete 1920 to 2015. and encompasses eleven volumes. There are another two volumes for 1847 to 1919 (incomplete), and yet another two for Back of Book). Happy, happy.

On balance you will find a home for all your stamps in the MYSTIC. You may want to first experiment with the non-premium version which will get you 1847-2015 complete for $40-. The pages are the same as the premium version but the binders are crappy.

Hope this helps.

Jack Kelley

Mystic doesn't sell them through other dealers, at least that I'm aware of. You might be able to find a used/unwanted copy on ebay, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too much in that regard. These haven't been around long enough for many of them to hit the secondary market. Although Mystic's album isn't cheap, it's probably the least expensive option for a hingeless album there is, and probably by a fairly significant margin.

Thanks for the responses! As Mystic direct is the only way to order new, does anyone know of any sales/discounts that I should watch out for or other ways to get the price down? A thread on this forum a few years ago mentions the cost at $70/album; it's gone up by $40+ since. Although I do agree, it still seems to be the least expensive option out there!

The prices in their printed catalog sometimes are a few dollars less that what you might see on their website, but otherwise I don't think there's a way around it. You could of course go with the non-hingeless variety, but then you have to figure in the cost of mounts, the time spent cutting and mounting, etc. Hingeless albums aren't cheap but they probably actually save money in the long run, and they certainly save a lot of time. You could maybe call Mystic and see if they'll sell you just the pages without the binder, and then go with a cheaper binder. I don't know if they'd do that and even if they did, your savings would almost certainly be less than the cost of a decent binder separately.

You can get the Heirloom pages without the binders but it will not save you much. The $40 is a deal. In fact, I decided to catch up on the supplements but got a lot for almost same money by buying just another set (3 binders, updates). My Heirloom was before they had page numbers and Scott numbers.

I am going the Mystic route for most US and then create replacements for definitive sections. I do not want to spend that much time creating pages.

I have been monitoring ebay for several months and used most albums for sale only go to sometime in mid-2000 at best. Many Mystic albums (some partial sections) sell for MORE than Mystic $40 deal.

The binders are not great but better than most what you find general binders unless you spend about $10 to $15 more. You can get them used.

The premium binder + slip case is $36 so if you need slip cases and not invested im regular binders this may be the better optiom.
Al

I went ahead and ordered the Heirloom hingeless 2005-2010 album and received it from Mystic yesterday (only took two days, I ordered in on Monday!).

I am really pleased with the quality of the album, pages, hinges, etc. That said, I have a TON of stuff from my Harris liberty album that does not have a home in the Mystic heirloom album. Most of the full stamp panes and regular issue booklets do not have a spot in the Mystic album. Also Harris has some stamps in blocks whereas Mystic has them in strips. Overall I think there is very poor mapping between the Harris liberty and Mystic heirloom albums.

All that said, I'm still thinking about transitioning the rest of my Harris liberty collection to the hingeless Heirloom album. My liberty album is old and the hinges are falling apart. I like the quality of the Mystic album. So the question is what to do with the extras from Harris. I'm not really interested in spending the time to create extra pages or put them in binders. I could sell the extras but it seems they are barely going for face value these days. I don't have a particularly strong desire to keep them- I will still have a version of the stamp in the Mystic album, just not all the different formats.

Does anyone have any advice as to options to proceed? Where's the best place to sell unused stamps from 1990-2010 era these days? On ebay they seem to be going for around 90% of face value. I'm not sure if I would get more money from a dealer/stamp show. I will still need to buy some of the stamp strips for the Mystic album that are present in the Harris album as blocks.

Thanks!

If you want to keep them, stock pages such as Vario sheets would be a good option. If you want to dispose of them, your best bets are to either use them as postage yourself, in which case you'd get full face value, or to sell them as a postage lot on ebay. I see most postage lots selling in the 75-85% of face value range. If you try to sell them to a dealer, you'll probably only get 50-60% of face because the dealer is probably going to sell them in the 80-90% range. Given that you'll have to pay ebay and PayPal fees if you sell them on ebay, there probably won't be a huge difference for you in the end.

Casinoboy3,

I agree with TheArtfulHinger although I doubt you'll even get those prices.

Jack Kelley