Looking For Ideas Country Separators In Album

I use Steiner so 8½x11 pages for worldwide collection and have multiple countries per binder.

I have used standard tabbed dividers but looking for something classier. I have used 8 tab and then printed the country name on a removable label. The tabbed dividers with inserts are out of the question.

Flexibility is important to add countries (if I maintain the alphabetical order) within a group (like British Commonwealth).

Sounds like you have a pretty good system...But, another idea would be to print up a a country page with map, country intro, flag, etc. and print it on a thicker paper than the rest of your pages.

Just a thought..

Chris has an idea I agree with

Worldwide collector.
I do not use Dividers, I organise Alphabetically, and place a print of the countries inside the front cover of the album.

This is married to a list (I employ MSWorks database) of all collections, and where they reside (2,200)

Yeah, I really don't see the need for dividers. None of the large worldwide albums (Scott, Minkus) uses them. Adds 100's of extra pages unnecessarily.

The only advantage I can see for dividers in a stamp album is for lightning-like speed in finding a country. Since it's a hobby we do in our leisure time, and we can generally locate any country alphabetically, and the extra time it takes to do that is only a few seconds, I don't think most people are too bothered by not having dividers.

But if you must have them, Chris2015's suggestion of using a heavier-weight page at the beginning of each country sounds as good as any. However (there's almost always a "however"), since the world of stamps involves well over 200 stamp-issuing "entities", adding 200 heavy-weight pieces of paper to my own albums would not particularly appeal to me.

I do think it's helpful to make a kind of "table of contents" of all countries in each volume of your album. Either make it the very first page or attach it inside the front cover. That way, you can glance at it to see if a country is actually in that binder and give yourself an idea which other countries it comes after. That can help locate it, too.

My final suggestion if you're determined and want something ultra-fancy is to get a print shop to make up your divider pages with those tabs that stick out, and have them either make labels you can attach or maybe they can print the names on the tabs for you. The expense of that might be a bit much, though. Personally, I think the "look" of a stamp album with divider pages is not all that attractive, but that's just my taste.

What I ended up doing was to create a separate country page but put the page is in a "page size" page protector. This type of page protector is less common as the standard size since the 3 holes in the page protector line up with the page so do not stick out in the album. This way you at least can see the beginning of a country section. I did not try to add a divider tab for the

I keep a page protector on front and rear of each album for protection.

For colonial entities - British Commonwealth, French Colonies etc - I group geographically, not alphabetically. This means that you don't have, for instance, the individual Malay States miles apart. And there's often a stylistic and cultural similarity within an area - eg French Near East and North Africa. I use a divider - just a sheet or a Lighthouse divider, depending on the type of album.

Just remember Tabbed Dividers probably are not acid free.

I was also considering regional groupings (British Asia, British Oceania, etc). I already put all Malaya/Malaya in one group by Malay/Malaysia state like all Johore in one group. Scott numbers that way but do not organize them in catalogue that way.