Davo Albums - Ordering From Their Site

I bought a Davo album for Jersey part one direct from the company. Worked out to under $200 with shipping.

http://www.davo.nl/en/our-products/...roducts.html

If anyone else is considering going through this site, be aware that the address fields in checkout appear to be set up in European format. You need to list the street name first then the numeric address. It took three attempts for me to figure that out.

Worth looking at GB auction sites for these areas - collections go for a pretty low price. I struggled to sell hingeless Marini/Yvert albums for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man for a cumulative £80 on ebay!

A Gibbons 'Luxury Album' would have cost half again as much. The only difference being the company name on the spine and title page.

I had always liked the looks of these but had stayed way due to my preference for pages that lie flat. On most of my albums I like to include covers on blank pages and that presents issues when using a peg system. My collections of Jersey/Guernsey/IOM are straightforward stamps only so no issue.

Received notice of mailing. The address they are shipping to got really mangled up. They have my numeric street address as the zip code and the zip code as my address. Hopefully this will be figured out.

Stamps, no need to make a problem out of it. I have done business with them for years and everything reaches me fine - with the mangled up address. They pack their mdse extremely well, so I think you will be OK. One thing, sometimes the folks at Homeland Security will go through the box and tape it back up but not as securely as the Davo people did. It will also delay your order.


Peter

Order was on my doorstep today, one week after ordering. Very fast service. Address was done correctly, no problems. These are very attractive albums, a row of them would look great on a bookshelf. I was worried about the pages not lying flat but the pages are scored now, not something they used to do. I still wouldn't want to put a lot of supplemental stuff on their blank ages but a few pages with protectors ought to be possible.

Two issues. The mounts are apparently water activated which makes some pages wrinkled. Not too bad but this company offers peel and stick mounts and those wouldn't have this effect. Probably that'd add to the cost.

I am noticing as I put stamps in the mounts that some are just not big enough. The top perfs touch the frame lines. I do push the stamps in as far as I safely can. The stamp boxes just seem smallish. I ran into this issue over twenty years ago when trying these. That was worse, a Canada album I had to return because the stamps actually protruded over the lines. Hopefully that will not be the case on many stamps I will be placing.

Out of ten, I'd give Davo an 8.5 so far.

I've always liked Davo albums. They're a premium album with high quality pages well laid out in handsome 2-post binders which contrasts favorably with more expensive albums like Lighthouse, Schaubek, and others. Those are German albums while Davo is Dutch. Davo makes albums mainy for European and a very few other countries. No China. No Japan. No Latin America, no Africa or the Middle East or India. They do have the USA and Canada.

Davo is priced a bit below the other premium albums (maybe $100 a volume). Their pages are well laid out, printed on very high quality paper, and the albums come with a slipcase standard (unlike Scott!). But since a complete single country requires up to five, six, or more Davo volumes, it really adds up. A "complete" Davo Italy, France or USA album will set you back a thousand dollars! That's less than the other companies charge, though. But you can easily see how limited their market must be -- and to whom they must sell. Not the average Tom, Dick, or Harry, that's for sure. That's another reason why most Americans are far more likely to put their stamps in Scott (or home printed or blank) albums.

I, on the other hand, have about 70(!) volumes of Davo albums. I find it a little hard to believe, myself. I got them at a time when I was convinced I could collect many countries in Davo albums without breaking the bank. I bought them on ebay one-by-one over a few years. Some were very mildly used, but most were basically new or at least untouched. Many came from an ebay seller who'd bought out a New York City stamp shop that had closed. Instead of a hundred bucks a volume (or more), I paid a fraction of that.

But the problem is that it's been difficult to finish a set of multiple volumes for any country without buying some volumes new, and that gets expensive fast.

Some countries I have completed in Davo volumes (the UK, for one, plus a few small Scandinavian countries). But the other 50 or 60 Davo albums for 20 or 30 countries I've decided to sell (on ebay!). Instead, I'm using Scott albums which are much less expensive for a complete country. I like Scott albums, their page layouts, page color (cream), and quality. Davo pages are eye-searing bright white and come in two-post binders only. No ring binder options available like Scott.

I'm a little disappointed I won't be using them because of the high quality of Davo products. But there's just so much I want to spend on products rather than stamps. And then there's food, shelter, and clothing, of course. And the Davo albums look really good all lined up on the shelves in their black slipcases with their padded black binders. I just can't afford them.

I found Davo's website really good! It's available in English which helps a lot. They also sell individual pages (Scott doesn't) to replace your missing pages which is very nice. Not cheap, though. And for some countries they offer fancy color title pages to replace the black and white title pages the albums come with. And other nice touches, too. Easy to order and quick delivery. Just a little too rich for my proletarian blood, I think.

- Drew M

I'm not keen on Davo myself, although I have quite a lot of them as my albums tend to be determined by what an auction lot comes in. Uniformity doesn't matter - or, in general, appeal - to me. At auction, those expensive, hingeless albums tend to be garnish, and heavily depreciated garnish at that. The logical approach would, I suppose, be to buy an expensive album for the expensive stamps - principally the early material of any country, rather than house penny stamps in £100 albums. But logicality and stamp-collecting often don't mix.