My Worldwide Collection: An Ongoing Journey

New Zealand remounting cont'd:

As I work my way through New Zealand I am finding fewer and fewer populated pages. I am up to 1976 and most pages are about 50% full. From here on out I will only post pictures of full or near full pages, as well as any custom pages I had to make and other "out of the ordinary" items.

Here are some of the latest pages remounted.

spain_1850,

Why do you piggy back (same design stamp mounted on top of another) stamps?

These are listed shade varieties that I neglected to notice when printing the pages. Normally I would do a page redesign to add a space, or spaces, for listed shades. I also keep a list of pages where I have done this, in order to revisit them and make a new page.

Nice display spain_1850

New Zealand certainly made some attractive stamps around their switch to decimal currency.

Thanks for explanation. I usually add to be mounted on a Vario page and place in the album. I may use post it notes with page on any special information as a reminder.

angore - That sounds like a very good way as well. Whatever works best.

Here is another situation I run into with the Steiner pages. Steiner, like Scott and other album manufacturers, provides spaces for se-tenant pairs and blocks. But I haven't seen any albums that provide spaces for the blocks, or pairs, as well as individual spaces for the individual stamps. So, you are usually left to try and fit individual stamps into the se-tenant space. I prefer both.


Here we have a typical Steiner page with 2 spaces, at the bottom. One for a se-tenant pair and one for a strip of three. Typically, however, you will find used stamps as individuals. So I needed to create a new page accommodating the individual stamps, as well as keeping the se-tenant spaces.

Here is the page I created for those 2 se-tenants.


I've had to do this several times, so far, for New Zealand.

Just finished reading this brilliant thread and thought I would weigh in with my own thoughts.
I have always collected w/w and a while back won 2 large cartons from Sandafayre here in the UK. I still have no idea how many stamps were in these cartons but have extracted a huge amount of items, with excellent sections of Austria and Germany in particular. I started mounting them in stockbooks at first but after a while realised I was not 100% happy with how they looked. I looked at the different options
for a while and then plumped for using SG Simplex Standard looseleaf albums with black mounts. I keep the writing up of the pages to a minimum of country and date in black ink and am very happy with how they look.
I can't post images at the moment as said albums are boxed away safely after a house move but will endeavour to get some up asap.

catching up and I missed my chance to comment on your Colombia collection! Well done and quite attractive! The 1947 Orchids issue is one of my favorite ... Colombia overall does a great job with flowers on stamps IMO.

Welcome yorkie68!
Interested to see your comment on the Sandafayre auction lot you purchased. I have been tempted to use them a few times but never got round to it, might take the plunge now! Was there a lot of competition for your item, bid-wise?
Regards
DavidR

Just took a look at the individual French items from Sandafayre's upcoming auctions. Estimates look alarmingly high. But presumably they get these levels of bids.

Hi David thanks for the welcome. From what I remember I think I bid around 75% of estimate on each of the box lots, I have no idea of how many other bids they had.

I haven't gotten much accomplished lately. I've kind of bee in a weird place with my collection. Sort of walking the line between exhilarated and overwhelmed. I still haven't finished the new Zealand project.

Whenever I get like this, I just randomly start looking through boxes and envelopes, which inevitably leads to feeling overwhelmed. Like, there are so many stamps and will I ever achieve any of my goals?

Part of my problem, I know, is I seem to have a habit of bringing in more than I organize or process, so they build up.

For instance: I have been trying to move along through the alphabet, finishing countries as I go. Right now I am to the point of just about finishing the "A" & "B" countries, although I do routinely sidestep this process to work on other countries that don't begin with A or B. I do have most of the BIG countries done in these 2 letters, so I just need to cleanup things and get the smaller, minor countries done.

But lo and behold, I've been picking up collections here and there and now I have envelopes full (AGAIN) from countries I have already thought I was done with. So now I feel the need to go back and revisit all these countries and process more stamps instead of moving forward and tackling unexplored territory.

I'm sure I will figure it out.

I have also been trying to work out what exactly I want to do with all the duplicates I've been amassing. Some I will keep for further study, but many I do not need.

About a year ago I picked up a 9 volume collection in Minkus Comprehensive worldwide albums (see picture). These albums, and most pages were like new. In fact I don't think they were used at all. Each binder had 2 yearly, worldwide supplements in them. Each one arranged A-Z. There were 16 supplements in all, plus the original one-volume Worldwide album 1840 to about 1965. The single volume album had a decent amount of stamps, and was clearly used for a while. It looks like the collector intended to expend, got all the binders and supplements, but never went any where with it.


I originally thought about flipping these, just to get rid of them, but decided to hold on to them for while. Then another collector made the suggestion to use these albums for housing duplicates. Hey, why not? I already had them but some work was going to be needed to collate them.

So, about a couple months ago, I spent about a week collating all 16 yearly supplements so they were alphabetical. The other day I finally decided to start mounting duplicates into these albums. Still not sure why, but that is what I am doing. They are mostly cheap stamps anyway. What it does it keep my backlog of duplicate-filled envelopes down a bit.

I am also going to make All-Dfferent country packs to sell ( or trade, maybe) with the triplicate stamps. there sure is enough to go around, that's for sure.

One thing I would really like to do however, is find 3 or 4 more binders, like the ones in the picture, so I can spread out the pages a bit more and each album won't be so bulky. I just don't know where to look for them. I am assuming they are no longer being made?

I guess I could buy cheap collections, if I find them, just for the binders, but I really don't want MORE STAMPS right now....UGHHHH!!

If anyone has any that they want gone, because I kow Minkus is not a very HOT ticket item, please let me know. These are the 2 1/2" binders.

spain_1850....I looked on ebay and didn't see any binders like you are looking for but, if you check back every few days, I'm sure that some will eventually come up for sale. I don't think I've ever searched for anything on ebay that I didn't eventually find, although sometimes it took awhile.

Coastwatcher - Thank you, I've been trying to keep tabs on ebay, as well as my local facebook marketplace. I'm patient though.

Just a quick update on what I'm up to.

I decided to sort, identify, print pages and mount one of the countries that, to me, requires being in the right mood to work with. Most of those countries have large amounts of CTO stamps, or stamps of questionable origin. I know many collectors don't like these countries, but I have already made the decision to include them in my collection.

The country in question, that I have been working on, is Afghanistan. I wish I had some decent coverage to show, but I do not. For the most part I just printed pages for single stamps that I have. Some pages have partial sets, but really not much to see at all. Of course the pages for the earliest stamps are blank. I really thought I had more from this country, but I only managed to mount 153 stamps total, through the year 2000.

Other than that, I've been placing a few stamps here and a few stamps there, from some of my already mounted countries.

So, as of today, my mounted stamp total is............16,846.

Now, since we had some snowfall overnight, and they recommended that people don't travel if they don't have to, I decided to have a little soaking, drying, pressing event.

A few weeks ago, I cam home from a local estate auction, with 3 tote trays filled with envelope clippings from France, Switzerland, Canada, Kenya mostly, but other countries as well. These were ll clipped from correspondence from some business person, here in the US, who had relatives and business associates, in all these countries. Lot's of duplication, but lots I don't have, so it's all good.

Anyway, after sorting out by country, I decided to do some soaking of the French commemoratives. Most of these are from the 60's to the 80's, with another nice batch from the 2000's.

Soaking:


The later adhesives I decided to leave on paper and just trim close, at least for now.


After drying on towels for a couple hours, it's time to be pressed.

This is my home made press, using 2 3" Hold down clamps and 8 pieces of scrap laminate flooring, layered with Bristol board, I can place up to 15 layers of stamps in it at once. This is way more than I ever need at any one time, and the stamps come out dead flat and smooth.


This project also gave me the opportunity to print out pages for 1970-1980 and extend my French album.

Decided to do a little album maintenance tonight. Up until now I didn't really have a good idea about how I wanted to label the binder spines.

So far I have been just experimenting with different programs and formats, but nothing has really stuck. Well, lately I have been adding more binders, but I've also been having to move some countries around in various binders since I am not printing pages in any kind of alphabetical order.

Tonight I decided to just make a simple format label. Something I can readily make ore of and not have to worry about fancy borders or anything else.

I downloaded a FREE program, from the Avery website, that allows me to do just that. For some reason I haven't been able to get the hang of any of the fancy programs on my computer, so this was great to find.

When I get the majority of my binders filled and arranged how I would like them, I will worry about making fancier labels at that time.

For now, here is a before shot (notice the different sized labels, etc..)


And the new labels (much more streamlined and consistent)


i also used a slightly larger font, which is easier for my ageing eyes to read.