Have You Ever Completed A Stamp Album?

One good thing about filling up an album. You can always get another one and fill that one up too!

Jack

Love the pan am inverts as a footnote. Drooling ...

Thanks for the idea! I've spent YEARS struggling with the hunt for the "perfect" album (which does not exist) and trying numerous ways to organize my giant collection. Now that I seem to be getting somewhere with it, the idea of taking a break and doing something fun with all my duplicates seems appealing. I just found a Traveler stamp album on ebay circa 1982 that seems perfect for the idea of reliving my younger collecting years and filling in all the spaces. Can't wait to get started :)

Amy

I saw a post on another thread about the CDs you can purchase on Amazon and ebay that claim to have many thousands of stamp album pages (66,000 for the one I bought). I was curious and the price was cheap, so I finally bought one. The album pages are scanned in from someone or several peoples' collections, so they show scans of each page with the stamps attached, many in mounts. It was really cool to see SO MANY filled pages. They looked like the Scott Browns and Blues. Each country went to different years, some into 2000 or later. Anyway, if you want to see what completed or mostly completed collections look like, you might check that out. I just sat and drooled as I looked through some of them.

It also looks like a good way to help identify some stamps by colors, etc, instead of looking at those black/white images. I think it was money well spent.

I wonder if those are copies of Mitch Ward's collection (Antonius-Ra)

I have put some thought into completing an album since this thread came out. I am currently working on a Scott Specialty Canada album. I decided that I needed a completion goal. What seems workable is to look for a percentage of completeness. I selected 95% completion as a goal. So for stamps 1-500, I need 475 for completion, 1-650 I need 618 for 95%. Book goes to 1991 - #1325 so a 95% completion would be 1259 stamps, 98% = 1300. So by going up in years, it gives you more harder to get stamps to skip. I can also gauge my project to see my current completion percent.

I am trying for 97% complete from #1 to #650. I will slowly replace hinged with not hinged stamps and keep used stamps to a minimum. I rarely buy hinged material unless it is older than 1920 and hard to find. That means I need 631 stamps and can skip 19. I will see how it works out but it gives me a goal of 19 missing. Then I will try to see my not hinged percentage. That is a harder goal so I may try for 95% on not hinged. That will leave 13 hinged. hmm.... I will have to see if that is a viable option. I have been getting a lot of MNH material and passing on hinged where possible. My big blues get my hinged replacements.

I look at complete-ability in terms of total numbers, as in "I'll be able to complete this entire album (or country, etc) minus these 5 stamps, which will likely remain unaffordable to me". Then there are those stamps that I consider a stretch, but are probably still doable at some point. If I'm determined enough, I'll get most of the "stretches" eventually, but probably not all. If there are too many stamps (percentage-wise) in the unobtainable or "stretch" categories, I'm not very likely to start up a serious collection of that area.

I will never be able to complete an album. For simplicity's sake, let me narrow this discussion to US airmail stamps. I collect used stamps. So, in theory, I could fill the 100 spaces for about $1,000. But for me the album is not finished. For example, I keep upgrading stamps as I find one I like better. So, in this example, I am replacing the top stamp with the one below it because I like the circular date stamps:



Should I find a nicely centered stamp with a CDS in the late 1940's, I'll upgrade again.

Or another example, I replaced my single of Scott #C11 because I found this pair so attractive:



And then when I find stamps like this, I feel compelled to add them:




So even this small section of the album is never complete.

Simply cant a lot of variety their

I broke 12,000 the other day in my Big Blue. over 1/3 there :)

Sheeez, I was happy just filling a page in my Minkus Global Supreme

Wow, 12,000 is a lot of stamps, great job! But, that's still a lot more to go...will keep you busy for a while

I need to get busy counting the stamps in my Big Blue!

I had made by own album based on King George V Silver Jubilee collection of 1935 from all the Commonwealth nations and completed all 250 stamps. Once this was done it was a great moment for me.

Well 250 stamps is not a big number to complete but doing this was a big achievement in myself.

Since I started this topic a while back I would like to report that my fellow stamp club remember completed his vintage Harris Traveller stamp album. His last stamp was an early Ifni item that he found at the recent WESTPEX show in Burlingame, CA. He received a well-deserved round of applause from the club members when he announced its completion!
D. Buss

Awesome - congrats to him!