H.e. Harris Crystal Mounts

Aquinas - be careful with showguard mounts. I have alot ot them. But I have seen showguard mounts warp. Both in stamp albums and ready for this in sealed product. Now that might be older mounts and not the newer ones. But you still have to be on the look out. Most stamp books eventually age out. If not the mount, the glue gets colored. If not the glue than toning of the pages etc...

Thanks, stampgreendragon. I'm fairly vigilant about checking mounts and album pages for signs of deterioration. I bought my Minkus album around 1975, and the pages, much to my surprise, still look good--the only exception being some minor toning on the title page where the black page-lifter rested against the paper.

One of the reasons why if I did use mounts, they would be Hawid style. Of course Showguard can be cut in half to create 2 long Hawid-style mounts.

I like Showgards because they hold stamps--and even very large souvenir sheets--firmly in place. No slippage. I've never used a Hawid-style mount, but I'm soon to find out what I think of them: I'm test-moving a small part of my collection into a hingeless album with Hawid-style mounts. If I like the result, I may go hingeless for the entire collection.

As mentioned elsewhere, environmental factors like heat and humidity have a big impact the longevity of mounts, album pages, stamps, etc.
I bought a collection where all the mounts on the first two pages were shriveled up and crinkling the perfs but the rest of the album was fine, so possibly the album had been sitting in a windowsill or the back seat of a car in the hot sun for too long. "Grandpa's old stamp album in the attic" or garage may suffer the same fate. I think it is as much (or more) how well the albums/mounts are taken care of versus the age of the Showgard mounts. Even a sealed package of mounts in the 1970s may have survived perfectly well since then, or warped beyond usability if the dealer kept his excess stock in a storage unit that wasn't air conditioned.

Thank you all for your thoughts and comments about the use of Crystal Mounts. I had no idea of the dangers of using it.

My brother and I used it religiously for our collections during the 1960s. But we probably used it differently than most users. Instead of gluing the crystal mount onto the page, we used a glassine hinge on the glue surface, then mounted it onto the page. This meant the majority of the glue on the Crystal Mount was never "activated".

Hopefully that method has reduced the amount of damage to our stamps that so many have experienced. I'm only now starting to dig out our albums which have been basically untouched for 54 years. Fortunately they were kept in a warm, dry environment all those years.

Looking forward to revisiting my youth and enjoyment of stamp collecting!