If There Were Something Like A Big Blue That Included World Revenue Stamps, Would You Use It?

If there were a general world classic era album like Big Blue or Minkus Global Supreme that gave commensurate coverage to world revenue stamps, would you be interested in collecting to that album? Or would you promptly rip out the extra back-of-book pages and throw them away?

I make my own pages for specialized collections, and the revenues are mounted with cinderellas and ephemera on their own pages, behind the postage stamps..."back of the book" style.

One of the reasons I like the Gibbons Ideal album is that it excludes postage dues and officials, which are usually dull stamps and in which I have little interest. Whilst I don't throw away non-postage stamps, whether fiscal stamps or Cinderellas, I shouldn't be delighted to find that I'd paid for an album that contained spaces for them!

Seeing some of the single-country catalogs for revenues, the number of volumes could easily double. Plus whoever put together the album pages would have to know what to put on the pages. Specialists are not necessarily going to help for free.

What I'm really curious about is the extent to which general world wide classics collectors also collect revenues and the like.

I agree with GeoffHa that one of the appeals of the SG Ideal album is it omits Postage Dues and Officials which I find, for the most part, boring. To the OP's original question I don't usually collect foreign revenues. But I did have an opportunity to purchase some Mexican revenues which attracted me, even though there was no album to put them in. My guilty pleasure is cut squares. But I realize that these were never popular outside the US, and no longer popular here.

collecting the world 1840-1940 I doubt many would ever complete, let alone if back of the book was included.

they're not postage stamps, but unlike many other things I do believe they have a story to tell that is important to include when collecting stamps.

i used to collect 1840-1940, but since I specialize in danish bicolour and plating of those and many other things, I decided it was too much.

i can only speak for the skandinavian area, but many "back of the book" stamps have been surcharged into postage stamps, and for those countries I think it's a given that there should be room for both the original and the surcharged.

as for the dull and boring part.

danish bicoloured stamps printed from 1870 to 1905 or so where printed along with the official stamps, and icelandic oval type and their official stamps.. same watermarks, same perforation machines and so on, so quite a lot of basic knowledge can be transferred into plating, searching for flaws and so on.

and not to offend anyone butif you're only interested in how they look, you might as well collect butterflies or stickers?

i think there's quite alot of history and investigation behind those little pieces of paper if you look for it.

Agreed. I'm a WW collector but I don't collect revenues. It's not a lack of an album that holds me back, it's just that there are more than enough postage stamps to keep me busy without adding revenues on top of it.

Comprehensive coverage of world revenues could easily be as large as the front-of-book sections. For certain countries (e.g., Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Indian States) the revenue pages could dwarf the front of book pages by an order of magnitude.

Would be a great thing to see, but a monumental task to compile.

I think there's something to be said for revenues, and several countries have some pretty interesting fiscal stamps. On one hand, I wouldn't mind an album that gave brief coverage to a representative selection of revenue stamps. On the other hand, completing a world wide album is a monumental task without the revenues.

I had an old Harris Liberty album, for US, that I discarded when I went to the Big Blue Internationals in the mid-1980s. I did keep the revenue pages and trimmed them to fit into my Big Blues. I have a scattering, then, of US revenues and pages to place them on. But I'm not actively collecting US revenues.

I disagree with those who say that collecting postage dues and officials is boring. I've got lots of postage dues; in complete sets; in my Portuguese colonies collection and consider them as integral parts of that collection. And, anyone check out values lately for classic Mexico officials? But collect what you want.

My Big Blue (1948 ed.) has pages for 1862-1940 U.S. revenues. Not all, of course, but a pretty decent representative selection of revenues that the average collector could have afforded at the time the album was published. If they existed, I'd use similar pages for other countries. I don't collect world revenues but have seen some here (Austrian revenues, for example) that I'd love to have some spaces for.

I got a 1947 ed. Junior Scott. It has spots for revenues too. But not that much. Still enough to keep me entertained !