Reorganizing Scott International

littleriverphil: yes, I have thought of paying a couple bucks to a local print shop to do the Scott Specialty strips for me. By chance are you a fan of the 1970s Aussie band: Little River Band?

Why, yes I did like them!
I lived in Little River, CA for 22 years. I began my growth from collector to PHILatelist, as my library grew faster than the collections. ebay began, I needed a user name..here we are.

I've read of others getting those strips cut and drilled, seems a ream of 65# card would make hundreds.

Instead of starting a new topic, I'm just going to expand on the original post. I now have a set of Big Blues through Part 6 and am debating whether to rearrange alphabetically or retain the current format. Any input from those who have done it either way?

Regardless, I have decided to keep Part 1 (1840-1940) intact only because I find that "classic" era to have the most interesting stamps, so I would only be rearranging by country Parts 2 to 6. And in order not to split the George VI era between volumes, I inserted Great Britain pages from Parts 2 and 3 into Part 1. I did the same with Germany through 1945.

Any thoughts?

I found that breaks by country and period made me juggle albums constantly. Yearly supplements were alphabetized but were kept separate from the original albums. Since I tend to buy lots and collections, the juggling problem became obvious real quick.

Even the Scott Classic catalog (also to 1940) arbitrarily includes George VI. But I find other countries to break the era limit like you did with Germany. You'll probably want to do more countries like that as I did, and will lose track of the era breaks like I did.

Nowadays my basic collection is in order by country. The trick became to try not to break a country into two albums and not end up with a nearly empty last album since I have also added material on blank pages. If you decide to fully alphabetize, of course you don't need to do it all at once.

The basic albums are too full despite having some favorite countries split off onto quad or country pages in Scott binders. I've done Brit cols by SG to show the shades they list; a few countries have somewhat specialized studies of cancels or varieties.

I would never put Vario pages in my Big Blue because I just don't like the look. But I realize that's it's a matter of personal preference.

I like to keep the parts as they were issued- separate. I know that is probably a minority position, because many collectors do combine the parts for reasons that have already been stated.

But I like to compare a countries issues with another countries issues for the same era - both the good and the bad.

Another reason - which has not been brought up before- is a complete part with all the stamps of that time era inside will generate more interest when sold, in my opinion, than if it is mixed in with all the other parts. Usually, most of the value of a multi-part BB collection resides in Part I 1840-1940. Therefore, most bidders only look at Part I contents to base their bid on, and see the other parts as "gravy".

Actually, keeping the volumes as-is is the way the vast majority does it, from what I've found. Most collectors seem to only get just volume 1 and 2, anyway. Plus a fair number of full album sets I've seen had very little outside of the first two volumes.

I think it depends on the scope of the collection. I've purchased at least a dozen large (8+ volume) Scott International collections; I only remember four that were kept in chronological order, the rest were rearranged by country (most kept the countries in alphabetical order, but there were a couple collections that did regional volumes.)

Collectors like to see a country's stamps together. If you only have two or three volumes, it's not too big a deal to just look in the other books, but if you go beyond that, rearranging seems more common.

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Good point, hy-brasil, that is one pitfall that came to mind. I could just remove the pages for the un- or underrepresented countries, especially for the later years and the junk producing entities, I suppose, just being sure not to discard them. At any rate, in keeping with my original plan of keeping Part 1 intact, I will finish it up first (already split into 2 jumbo binders ) and see how things go from there.

Thanks everyone for the comments.

My own set of International Albums to 1960 were reorganized by country when I bought them in the late 1960s, and sadly, with my shift to postal history have been largely ignored since the early 1980s.

However, while reading the above discussion, it seems to me that a practical approach might be to maintain the pre-1940 pages in one volume -- or two if necessary, and then organize all the post 1940 pages by country. That way all the classic material is in one place, and you have the ease of accessing each country in one place for all the years of the "common" stamps.

Has anyone tried this?

Keeping Part 1 intact was part of my plan from Day 1. With the addition of interleaving, supplemental pages, etc. I've already split Part 1 into two binders. After that, I am strongly leaning toward country order. For anything after 1968 I will just print Steiner pages or make my own as needed.

It's worth noting that the process of collating Scott International album pages into alphabetical order can be very time consuming. I'm on my second round, having recently bought a few new eras worth of pages to replace some earlier pages of the same eras which were (mistakenly) thinner and not of the same quality. Scott has upgraded its page quality in these albums over the years, and I tried to combine earlier International pages with new pages. Not a good idea as the margins are different, thickness of paper and even color (whitish to beige or cream colored) varies too much. It takes days to collate all the A's, then the B countries and so on.

My pages cover from 1840 all the way through 1975, so that required purchasing about a dozen different "bricks" of pages for all these different decades. I decided on 1975 as my cut-off date for a number of reasons. It's where one set of pages ends. It's just before when most of the collector-only flood of stamps began be issued (though it includes some of the, unfortunately, and 1970 or even the 1960s might work a little better). And it covers through the first 20 or so years that I was a collector, so I can work with stamps I remember rather than many thousands of newer stamps. I can't believe there are collectors who try to collect from 1840 all the way into the 1980s or 1990s or up to the present! That would require an entire bookcase of albums -- and deep pockets. My wife would not be amused, I fear.

Nevertheless, I'm still sold on this plan. When I'm done I will have 30 (smaller) volumes of Scott International pages beginning with Aden (I think that's right) all the way through Zambia, etc. in the final volume. These volumes, by the way, are not in Scott binders which I think are much, much too thick for easy handling. They're in some Subway Stamp Shop version of the same binders made more narrowly (about 3" thick), about the size of a standard Scott National album binder. I find these much easier to handle and better looking. I got them on ebay. Lucky break as I've asked Subway about these really nice binders, and they don't sell them anymore. That really seems like a short-sighted business decision to me, but what do I know?

When I'm done, all Brazil, all Portugal, etc. will be together in the same binder. I never liked have a country split up in various different chronological volumes. Too confusing for my taste to find the right volume I needed of a country and a bit schizophrenic to have many different Switzerlands and Japans, and so on. But plan on many days of collating!

The one real "innovation," if you can even call it that, that I've decided to adopt is that I put pages of precursor countries with pages of countries by their modern names. This is particularly common with African countries which had so many name changes. So Northern Rhodesia pages precede the pages of Zambia which it became, Southern Rhodesia precedes Zimbabwe . . . Newfoundland, PEI, Nova Scotia, etc. precede Canada, and so on. The idea of having all these early countries which later got different names (or got added to some other country) scattered throughout various binders seemed confusing and a bit silly to me. So Cape of Good Hope and Orange Free State precede South Africa, and so on. I combined Persia and Iran pages, naturally, which Scott still had separately (I think that's right?).

I plan on typing up a "concordance" to post near my albums to remind me at a glance where some of these countries' pages are located.

There are a few exceptions such as Bavaria which I've left in the B's rather than putting before Germany. These exceptions just "seemed" best to me to leave where they where, though I'm not sure I can explain why. Maybe it has to do with number of pages -- the more pages, the more likely I'll leave it where it already is.

I've also rearranged Scott's page order, putting semi's and air mails for every country in their chronological order, rather than separately after the other stamps. This always seemed really silly for Scott to do, and it's not what the Stanley Gibbons or Michel catalogues do, if I recall. I want all the stamps a country as close together by year as possible, not pages apart. It's not always perfect, but pages go as close to chronological order as I can get them. Having all stamps from an era of each country together gives a better look at the style of stamps over time and how they evolved.

I've removed most postage due and official stamp pages (and many other oddball stamps I have little interest in, preferring to stick to stamps used on actual mail) since I don't like them much. It saves a tiny amount of album space, as well.

With some countries I reorganized regional stamps more effectively. For example the Malay states got organized together by state from beginning to end and not by time period, since organizing by time period meant each Malay state kept starting up again and again every decade or so. This annoyed me.

I found a few errors and missing pages which I plan to write Scott/Amos Advantage about and see if they will supply them without my having to buy entire expensive sets of pages. I feel that I personally am supporting Scott Publishing in recent years, I've made so many album and page purchases!

Finally, there was a question about page spacers (cardboard strips) for these International albums. I made my own and mounted them in one album about every 25 pages or so, but I really did not like the look. So, I removed them all and I've decided on a different approach. The main reason for these page spacers is to prevent the album from bulging after stamps are mounted on the pages. But another reason for using them is to help with the problem of pages curving at the front and back of the binders. Curved pages are hard to mount stamps on, and they are more likely to bend mounts or hinges so stamps fall off the pages. My way of dealing with this is not to use page spacers, but simply not to fill any binder with pages. I leave a lot of room in each binder (half an inch or so) so the pages are relatively loose. This means that stamps will not bulge the binder out, and it means that the front and rear pages don't curve as much as they would otherwise. In theory, anyway. We'll see how this actually works.

Boy, this sure got long, didn't it?!