Pulled The Trigger On American Heirloom Albums

I was finished with Christmas shopping and actually had something left over, so I went ahead and got the American Heirloom albums from Mystic. I checked out the reviews on here first and decided that I'm after 43 years it was time for something new. My tired old Minuteman will still see use for my used stamps and the AH albums will be for my mint stamps. The biggest gripe I read of relative to the AH albums was the quality of the binder. I considered going with the heavy duty albums, but in the end I just went with the $39.95 special. I spent several hours mounting stamps the day it arrived and can honestly say I'm completely satisfied, if not thrilled. I can't imagine needing anything more elaborate.

It is a very good deal and obviously a method to attract customers since you will get lots of mailings once you place an order. For example, I just received a year end mailing from Mystic offering the latest supplement. 2016 issues, etc. Mystic also does not over price the supplements.

With the vinyl sealed seams on the edges they do look a bit cheap but then I have 28 Mystic binders and a few slip cases. I picked up many of mine from fellow collectors migrating and off ebay.

The binders are not bad and seem to be fairly durable. The primary issue I have had with binders is the rings getting out of whack so they are misaligned and do not close. The Mystic have done better than binders so what I paid, I am happy.

However, you can buy binders at any price/quality level you want. I have many different ones.

You will need more since once you put stamps on the pages they will not fit in the 3 binders provided.

Enjoy

You can upgrade to the better binders later- that is what I did. The deluxe ones hold more pages.

About the only thing I disliked about these is the lightweight paper. I put my pages in page protectors. I have the whole thing complete through 2015 so it takes up 12 binders. Well worth it.

I really don't have a problem with the Heirloom's page thickness. The premium binders and slipcases (I have 16 of them) are adequate although, like angore, I have a couple of binders with misaligned rings. The new 2016 supplement is now available.

Jack Kelley

I've always been quite happy with mine.

I figured I'd be hard pressed to fit all of the pages in the three binders after adding stamps. My current thought is to just combine the contents of the first two albums into the three. I have no plans to chase after any of the current self-stick stamps, so those pages are kind of redundant. I expected as much after seeing album three for sale on ebay several times over the last few months.

I use 6 Mystic binders for all page through 1996. I would recommend trying to over stuffing the binders since it will put extra stress on binder holes pages. Binders are cheap and can be purchased anywhere.