Scott International Coverage After Volume 1

I've seen stamp counts for Big Blue volume 1 in a number of places. I'm curious about the coverage in subsequent volumes. How many spaces are in volume 2 (1940-49), volume 3 (49-55), volume 4 (56-59), etc. What percentage of total worldwide emissions have spaces in the International?

I'm not asking anybody to count spaces for me. I'm just wondering whether the International coverage improves over time. Thanks.

Without getting into numbers, yes, the International coverage does improve over time.

By the mid- 1950s, the International coverage is good for a WW album - only the souvenir sheets consistently lack coverage.

Coverage improves considerably in Part II, and becomes very good by Part III and after. I've been hard-pressed to find many "regular" stamps (e.g. non-official, non-postage due) missing in my copies of Part III/IV.

And if you do want #s - someone has counted them all (not sure of edition)

Part I - 34,410, Part II - 16,857, Part III - 14,033, Part IV - 8,621, and Part V - 11,662
for a grand total of 85,583 possible stamps through the albums.

Thanks for the info. I was thinking that since the 1979 supplement has 323 pages for a single year, the coverage must be almost comprehensive.

After the first three volumes, which are abridged to varying degrees, Scott International albums are reasonably comprehensive, but there are important exceptions.

Souvenir/miniature sheets are left out, for one thing, and generally, stamps that were issued but not made available to the philatelic market at the date of issue will not have spaces in Scott International albums, even if they are listed in the Scott catalog.

This has happened quite a lot in the smaller independent African countries the last thirty years or so -- they issue a stamp or set without sending press announcements, or UPU specimens, or copies to new-issue subscribers, etc. and the stamp only gets noticed and listed in the catalogues years later. It also has happened for many sets from countries like Paraguay, Bhutan, Nicaragua, etc. where there was at first doubt about whether they were authorized by the postal authorities, and they weren't originally listed in the Scott catalog or included in the International album pages.

International albums are also somewhat inconsistent about the back-of-the-book stuff they include -- some countries have their postal tax or parcel post stamps included and some don't, for example.

If the Internationals aren't newer editions, they may be missing pages for various countries subject to US Cold War-era embargoes: People's Republic of China, North Korea, Castro-era Cuba, Islamic Republic of Iran, North Vietnam, South Yemen, etc.

"By the mid- 1950s, the International coverage is good for a WW album - only the souvenir sheets consistently lack coverage." And thank goodness for that. The flood of really pointless souvenir sheets in the postwar era would sink many collectors, so I'm very happy Scott left them mostly out of the International. I collect stamps, not just any postal paper a country wants to issue to get more dollars from collectors. Countries like Mongolia are the worst (and I collect Mongolia!), issuing many dozens of souvenir sheets for rock 'n roll groups, Elvis, Lady Diana, the Three Stooges, and other topics having nothing to do with Mongolia and clearly aimed at getting more money out of collectors. I'd guess almost none of these are ever used to actually mail anything.

The same applies to a number of other countries which are well recognized as not having responsible stamp issuing policies. Even the U.S. has crossed the line at times. I'm willing to bend a bit and mount some souvenir sheets, but not sheet after pointless sheet on subjects completely unrelated to a country's culture or history. With some albums I use, I've made it a practice to remove many pages with spaces for souvenir sheets on them, though certainly not all since some served a purpose like commemorating an event. (This rant brought to you by my reasons for supporting Scott's policy of excluding most souvenir sheets, at least in their International albums. Good for them.)

As for coverage, it's as described above by others. Volume I's coverage being pretty bad at times. Providing spaces for only three out of five stamps in a set is common. This is too much baby sitting for my taste since I'm perfectly happy leaving the two high value spaces empty -- or putting space fillers in them. I want to see that there are stamps I don't have even if I may never have them. Why did Scott even think such an approach was a good one? It was mainly because they wanted their customers to feel they could "complete" the album someday. And a horrible thought that is!

I understand leaving out rarities which no one could ever own. I disagree with leaving out stamps that are simply expensive. And some of them aren't even that expensive! That's the great flaw of Volume I which repeatedly annoys collectors today for this reason as it has for over a century.

By Volumes II and III (the 1940s) this problem is less apparent And by the 1950s volumes (IV and V?l), new stamps were so often generally available, they are nearly all included. This wasn't the result of some new, improved editorial thinking on Scott's part. Their approach remained the same -- to include only stamps most collectors might acquire. The far more complete pages from this point on is simply because stamp availability had changed. Collectors could now get almost any stamp a country issued.

If someone were to "fix" the main problem with Big Blue they would spend 90% of their time fixing Volume I's omissions. One solution, if you can call it that, would be to purchase the Subway Stamp "Vintage Reproduction" pages which are the complete -- nothing left out -- pages that Scott had once issued long before they revised the International album to its modern more truncated format mainly in Volume I. That will cost you about a thousand bucks, though, and you're going to need at least another ten or fifteen binders to hold all those additional pages. If you then add Volume II and subsequent pages, you'll have a pretty complete world album. If you can find the space to store it! You'll never fill a huge percentage of the early spaces, of course. But you may not care.

My completely random guess is 50-60% coverage for Volume I, 70-80% (maybe higher) in 1940s Volumes II and III, then 90% or even 100% from 1950s onward. If someone wants to do some counting,, though, please feel free to show my figures wrong as this is just my gut instinct from looking at pages. I've never actually counted anything.

I also imagine it varies from country to country, too, right from the beginning with some countries having much more coverage than others. I recently compared the first few Vol I Great Britain pages in my Scott International with the first pages in my Scott Specialized Britain album which includes all British stamps. I'd guess for the first few decades and beyond, the International album leaves out well over half the stamps that are in the Specialty album. It's kind of shocking to see it from one album to the other. But there it was. Omitting all those not-so-cheap stamps. does make it a lot easier to use the International -- if easier is your goal, as it was the motivation for Scott when it issued that album.