Desire To Go From Stock Books To Preprinted Country Albums

Hi everyone,

I'm exploring the process of transferring a mint collection of stamps from stock books to preprinted country pages. The collection is from modern Ukraine (1992 on).

There aren't a lot of choices of preprinted albums for this country. They include Schaubek, Lindner, and Palo for starters.

I'd appreciate some comments and comparisons—based on your experiences—as to these manufacturers' general quality (system ease-of-use, pages' paper weight, hingeless vs. non-hingeless, Michel vs. Scott numbering, and the like).

Thank much in advance.

Andrew1961, welcome to the forum. Other then the above ( expensive ) choices there is always this forum! You can go to the search function above and enter Ukraine. We have a great member by the name of Apastuszak who has designed a beautiful set of pages just for your country.
Another choice would be Steiner pages.

Peter

My experience of Schaubek is that it produces robust albums with good capacity, and I have a large number if them. Its two hingeless albums for Ukraine will cost around €430, cf €250 without hinges. This is likely to be less than either Palo or Lindner. Printed albums don't ordinarily show catalogue numbers unless the printer is also the catalogue publisher (eg Yvert) - rather, they follow the arrangement of a particular catalogue publisher, usually one based in the publisher's country.

A probable less expensive alternative would be Steiner pages.

This might be even a better deal if there is a possibility of expanding the collection to other countries or eras.

http://www.stampalbums.com/

You can print them yourself.

If one doesn't want to print oneself, there is a service (for a price) that will do it for you.

From Steiner web site..

"can provide not only 8 1/2 x 11" pages, but also any of the pages printed on Scott International or Specialty sized paper."

I use Palo economy for my German States and Reich collection. The stamps are sometimes rather oddly arranged, very rarely they are repeated, and they don't include Scott or Michel numbers. On the other hand, they are not too expensive and look quite nice.

People told me when I was considering buying them that the pages were too big and hard to turn. That may be for the Regular albums, but the Economy line is a little smaller, and I have had no problem. All in all, I'm quite satisfied..

Don

andrew1961:

If you use standard pages and your stamps are all mint never hinged, you will have to get mounts (probably many sizes) and a cutter or two to keep the stamps as new.

That will add a lot to the cost and also a lot of extra time and work.

If you buy hingeless (mounts attached) albums, all the work is done for you. The cost is higher but by the time you pay for the standard album, buy all the mounts required, etc, you will be no better or worse off except have saved a great deal of time.

If you have souvenir sheets they are an even bigger headache as they are very seldom the same sizes.

These are choices you have to make based on your own wants and needs and both work well.

Personally, I have tried both and now all my country albums for mint never hinged stamps are all hingeless.

Thanks, everyone, for the great replies.

As there's no urgency to dive into one display system over another, I'm doing the research first to see what will fit my wants (more than needs). I'm leaning toward hingeless, mostly for the time/effort/cost reasons. Palo is going to send me sample pages from their premium and economy lines, as will Schaubek. Lindner won't send a sample, but will forward a PDF for demonstration. I'd rather have something in my hands.

Thanks, again.

Here's a link to apastuszak's Ukraine pages.

As noted above, using Steiner pages is cheap and easy but you may want to add mounts and that will greatly increase the price. Also, the page size is small (8.5 x 11"), though with a larger wide-bed computer printer it is possible with some manipulation of the border size to print a larger layout on larger paper which you can then put into, say, an older Minkus binder or a modern larger binder like those from Lighhouse or Schaubek or even Davo. To put larger pages in one of these publishers' binders you'd have to print on their paper. Otherwise, you may be stuck with the smaller sized paper (which doesn't allow for much leeway in laying out the pages and which you may find somewhat cramped). Smaller pages printed from Steiner's page files generally end up in standard 3-ring binders of some kind.

Among preprinted albums, the best of the popular ones are Lighthouse, Schaubek and Davo. I don't think the Davo album company in the Netherlands publishes a Ukraine album, but be sure to look at their website to find out as their albums are not only good (hingeless and regular) but somewhat less costly than those of the other two publishers. I use a lot of Davo albums and like them very much. Davo has an easy to use website (with an English language option).

Both Lighhouse and Schaubek make very high quality albums, some of the best. Both are German publishers. I've just completed a comparison of the three brands' albums by looking at binders, pages, layout, and most importantly, costs. I'd say Davo wins for overall affordability, but Schaubek wins the price battle between itself and Lighthouse.

LH is often considered the gold standard, but Schaubek is pretty close in quality and a bit hard to tell apart, really. And Schaubek albums and pages are somewhat less expensive. Still, each group of pages covering a decade or two will cost a great deal of money. But you only need to buy them once, except when you add supplements and those will also be expensive.

Look at both publishers websites for information and be sure to send for their free album catalogue (offered on the websites) which show a lot of very appealing stuff you're going to wish you could afford to buy.

A more creative and much less expensive alternative is to use the high quality larger blank pages from a publisher like Schaubek either in quadrille or "blank" pages to make your own albums. Oddly, these pages are actually less expensive than Scott blank pages -- by a good deal -- even though they are just as nice, if not nicer. Go figure. It would be fun (or not, as you're inclined) to do your own stamp layouts and your own labeling on these pages mounted in a very high quality Schaubek binder. The look would be sophisticated -- but highly personalized at the same time. Albums I've seen which a collector has laid out and annotated themself are always much more interesting to me than standard pre-printed albums which lack personality. I'd be inclined to go that route for a single modern era country since it would be a manageable job -- less so for a series of countries or a longer time period which would take a great deal more effort.