These pictures of old albums are terrific.
I also was given a Regent Stamp Album when I was in my early teens around 1962 or so. It was the only thing I asked for that Christmas, so it must have driven my father (sorry, Santa) a bit nuts to have to go find it. Mine was in two volumes, and I spent most of my time just browsing through it, amazed at all the stamps I was sure I'd have someday, rather than ever managing to put many stamps into it. It disappeared years ago, but no real loss since it had so few stamps. I bought a used one a few years back just to try to rekindle that feeling again, but I think you have to be about 14 or 15 to feel that amazement so fairly quickly I passed it on.
I think the Regent album somehow became one of the main American stamp albums in the 1950s. I think it was published by Grossman Stamp Co. or Publishing Co., but I imagine they don't exist anymore. The other really "serious" album at this time was, of course, the Scott International. Into this world came the Minkus worldwide albums, I think it was sometime in the 1950s, trying to compete by cramming more stamps on each page. His country albums were competitors with Scott Specialty albums and fairly clever for including all stamps for any year together, rather than the (silly) method used by Scott of separating airmails and semi-postals from other stamps. Minkus seemed to focus on many rather odd countries, though (Ghana?) while not publishing albums for many mainstream countries, so I never understood their strategy. I did have a Minkus Switzerland looseleaf album for a few years that was very nice. It must have been cheaper to buy than Scott's Swiss album.
Most of the really old albums I've owned were pretty much turning to dust. The older pages were not acid-free and with heavy use over the years, they get pretty torn up. I've even sadly thrown away a few old, crumbling albums that really could not be saved -- very sadly, I have to say, as they had sentimental value for someone at some time.
I wonder if the APS or someone "collects" old album as a reference collection for the history of stamp collecting. J. Walter Scott issued his first stamp album sometime in the late 1860s, I think, but it was a kind of blank album well before the Scott International was created some years later. I wonder if they have a copy of that? Or of the other very early U.S. and European albums. The real acceleration of stamp collecting was during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and I think quite a few new albums got published then for all the collectors who could hardly afford new clothes or a new car, but could afford cheap stamp packets to have fun with and needed albums to put them into. Sorry, not pictures of any old albums -- but the ones shown here are amazing. |
Posted 04/06/2017 12:31 pm
