My Worldwide Collection: An Ongoing Journey

I'm really enjoying the description of this journey and the solutions you've come up with. We moved about twelve months ago and I'm still trying to keep tabs on where things are now.

I know where they were in the old house, but here I often have no real idea. As stuff gets put on shelves I'm trying to put quite detailed labels (without writing an essay) so that I can easily identify what's what

Been out of commission with the flu the past week and haven't even touched a stamp in that time. Today I finally started feeling myself again.

Looking forward to add some new content to this thread this weekend.

Next installment I'll talk a little about the various catalogs I am using, as well as my inventorying method.

Welcome back.

angore - Thank you. Feels good to be back at it that's for sure.

crispinhj - I'm right there with you. I was really dreading moving all my stamps, but looking forward to it at the same time. I had a rather small area for collecting, at the old house. But I knew where everything was. Now I have a dedicated stamp room and have the opportunity to set things up better. It's till a work in progress.

What is the "Big Blue" stamp album to which you refer? Have seen this album referenced in other strings as well.

A Scott album that Americans love and no-one else uses! All you need to know is continued herein

http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.com

Choosing a worldwide stamp catalog was not really a problem for me. I've always maintained a set of Scott catalogs and currently have a 2006 hard copy set, as well as a 2013 set on CD.

These work well for me for a couple reasons.
1 - Since I live in the US this is the catalog of choice by most US-based dealers. So, that makes it much more convenient when going to stamp shows.

2 - I chose the Steiner system of album pages and they are, basically, arranged in Scott catalog order.

But, as I revealed earlier in this thread, my goal is to go slightly beyond what is printed on the Steiner pages and what is listed in the Scott catalog, without going too far into extreme specialization. So, it was clear I was going to need catalogs beyond Scott.

I started acquiring catalogs that covered several countries, and are more "specialized" than Scott, for those countries.

I already had Edifil catalogs, from my Spanish specialization period, that cover Spain and all it's Colonies. Also, A Facit catalog for Scandinavian countries.

Other catalogs I've recently bought:
Maury - for France
Stanley Gibbons - GB and Empire

I'm sure I'll be looking at other catalogs as well, such as Michel, for German area. But I'm not in a hurry.


Inventorying:

It was also clear I was gong to need a system to keep track of what I already have, and what I need, at least as far as basic catalog numbers go.

There are apps and software for this purpose that really look comprehensive, but would they work for me? Probably not. Also considered was a spreadsheet system. This would have worked OK, but my intention was to be able to use it on my phone, or wife's Kindle, and I couldn't seem to get it to work very well.

Finally, I made the decision to try and use a VERY simplified list of numbers, using a MS Word doc. This works well for me.

Here are a couple screen captures of one of my Belgium list.
Basically, it's just a continuous list of consecutive numbers, separated by commas, based on Scott of course.
Sets are enclosed by parenthesis and different colors are used to represent different things. All numbers start as black. If I have a stamp in used condition, the color changes to blue. An unused stamps (MNH, hinged, or whatever) is turned green. Damaged stamps, that need upgrading, are in red.


Air Mail, Semi-Post, and other back of the book stamps have their own sections. But I didn't like typing in the prefix before each number, so each section would be labeled such as "Airmail C#'s". That way I could just copy and paste the actual numbers from a master file.

Very impressive! I just tick the catalogue in the appropriate column, with one tick for M, two for UM.

Whilst I shouldn't use it myself, I can understand the appeal of the Steiner system for US collectors. One way around the dull formatting and the need for more specialised pages would be to buy the CD, use the sizing etc information, but then mount the stamps on blank or quadrille abum leaves, which would also avoid the unappealing A4 (or US equivalent) sizing that comes with pages from the web. I pay around £100 for 1,000 quadrille album leaves, but I imagine they'd be cheaper in the US.

Back in the day, when I tried WW for the first time, I did something similar. I used a highlighter and just marked cat # and either the used price or unused price, depending on which I had. Problem now would be that it would be rather cumbersome to carry a set of Scott catalogs around a stamp show.

As far as the Steiner system goes, I suppose you could print the pages on nicer, larger format stamp album paper, but in my case that just wasn't economically feasible. If I have to choose between being able to buy stamps vs. buying nice albums, I'll choose stamps every time.

Besides, I love the basic, uncluttered format. Too much jazz in the border, or too much writing only serves to distract this old stamp collectors eyes from the stamps.

That's why this hobby is so great, there is room for everyone.

I didn't mean printing - just mounts or hinges and whatever titles you want to write and stick on.

Ok, I thought I'd take a break from all the introductory stuff and get into some actual stamps.

When I first started printing pages out, I started with smaller countries just to get a feel for what I was doing. One of the first BIG countries I printed was Belgium. At the time, I wound up with 1043 Belgian stamps mounted in 3 1"binders. My initial cutoff date was 1980, but that was mostly because I had very little beyond that. So, these pages were arranged in 3 1" binders as follows:

1 - Regular issues & back of the book 1849-1980
2 - Semi-Postals
3 - Precancels

One thing I noticed about collecting Belgium is that it's a pretty straight forward country to collect and they are fairly easy to sort out, even in large batches. Most of the commemoratives issued after about 1960 have micro-printed dates on them, which was a BIG help.

About a month ago I got, in the mail, a mostly used, mostly different batch of approximately 2500 Belgium. This is what I have been working on the past couple weeks, when I wasn't laying in bed sick. I'm actually about done with them. I've already been through the regular issues and I'm currently working on the semi-postals.

This batch pushed my cutoff to 1992, so more pages were needed. It also forced me to expand to 4 1" binders.

Out of this 2500 I'm hoping to add around 1000, thereby doubling my total inventory of mounted stamps. I should have the final tally in a day or so, after I do my bookkeeping.

Here are the first 4 pages in my Belgium album. I had to rearrange/alter some of Steiner's pages here, to my liking.
Most of these earlies came out of the collection mentioned at the beginning of this thread.





Here is another page I ran across, last night, that I needed to make a custom page to replace. The Heraldic Lion stamps, according to my Scott catalog, have several with shade variants that Steiner chose not to include. Unfortunately, by adding the new boxes, I had to actually split the page in into 2separate pages. Not a big problem though.

So this page:


Turned into these 2 pages, by adding 6 spaces for listed shades:

OK, the final tally is in for Belgium
As of today there are 1655 total stamps mounted, for Belgium.

So I was able to add just over 600, which is a bit disappointing. On the bright side, I still have a couple hundred that NEED to be added to the album, that I do not have proper size mounts for. These I don't count in my totals until they are placed in an album.

Everybody; and I mean everybody; is light years ahead of me as far as Worldwide goes. I just started my WW collection last week!

Jack Kelley

Where are you starting - any particular group of countries?

Everyone starts somewhere. To be fair, even though I have been an active WW collet or for about a year, it is the culmination of about 45 years of accumulating.