My Worldwide Collection: An Ongoing Journey

Geoff,

All of 'em. This is so new that I haven't even received any of the collections/lots that I ordered. I am figuring that the most expensive part will be the hinges. This collection is strictly for the purpose of filling as many boxes as I can. It will be cheapo Harris Statesman albums and I intend to swap out as many filled Harris pages as I can.

Jack

Enjoy! I think you could lower yourself to Prinz hinges, though! Do the Harris albums have spaces for a decent range from each country?

Something new, Geoff.
KGVI Palo MH is on hold, having completed up to Leeward Islands (excepting India) Davo UK used/mint is still active. I want to finish QEII and KGVI before taking a rest. Mystic MNH 20th Century and used 19th Century is still on hold as it is fairly complete anyway. I am stopping at year 2019 as that will fill my final binder.

As for WW, its something new. The Statesman has lots of pictures, which is good for me. The hinges scare me, though. And, the Fold O Hinges are just as expensive as the Dennison's. Have you used Prinz? Are they any good?

They aren't good in the way that a peelable hinge is, but, if you apply a minimum of moisture, I find them OK. With most common, used stamps, it doesn't matter much anyway, as you can always soak them off if desperate. They can often be scrunched up in the packet, though. I can buy10,000 for less than twenty quid from Amazon. All of these modern hinges are made by Prinz, as far as I know, so there's no gain in buying a Lighthouse or Gibbons brand.

There are easier ways to collect, of course ...

That's funny.
Makes me extremely thankful I don't have unlimited funds to buy stamps.

Now that Belgium is done for the moment, I can turn to other matters.

A few weeks ago I printed pages for the Portuguese colony of Azores, and started mounting the few stamps I had. I thought it would be a fairly easy country to get through. Then I noticed some discrepancies between the Steiner pages and what my Scott catalog was listing, as far as the Ceres issues are concerned.

My 2006 catalog states that there are 2 different perforations, at the top of the listing. But it doesn't tell you which stamps can be found in which perforation. Well, I couldn't go any further until I got down to the bottom of this.

I did some googling and found out that as of 2014, Scott split the set into the 2 different perforation varieties, creating a whole bunch of new numbers. Neither my 2006 copy, nor my 2013 CD showed this change.
So, I found, on ebay, a seller who de-compiled a 2018 Scott catalog, and was selling the pages by country for a couple $'s each. This was preferable to buying a whole new catalog, just for the Azores listing, so I bought them.

Now, after comparing the listings in the 2018 Scott pages to the Steiner album pages, I see he was on top of things, as they do match. I guess this is one argument to have the latest catalogs, if possible.
After mounting my meager holdings of stamps from this Portuguese colony, it is apparent that is a weak spot in my collection. Oh well. This is my collecting journey, and will include the good, as well as the bad.

However, not wishing to scan a bunch of near empty pages, I will instead scan some of the more populated pages, as well as some interesting/better items I find along the way.

Scott 35a (found amongst the stamps from the accumulation mentioned in my original post.


A few pages of the Ceres issues, mounted in their correct spots…..I hope.

Since it's been about the 1 year anniversary of me declaring that I was going to collect WW, I figure I'd post a picture of the fruits of my labors so far.

The 22 1" binders on the top shelf, plus the few Scott binders below, contain the 14,000+ stamps I've processed and mounted so far. Doesn't include all the stamps that have been identified but not mounted because of a lack of proper size mounts. This is just a drop in the bucket of what still needs to be completed. Not sure if I'll ever reach tat magical number of 100,000, but I'm going to enjoy the journey.

The recent thread here on his forum, concerning the Austrian Newspaper stamp, inspired me to create this page for the few privately perforated Austrian newspaper stamps that I have.



Ive found that it's much more interesting to bounce around from country to country, completing small tasks, rather than focus on one country for long periods of time.

SPAIN ---Nice showing ,everything looks real nice ,nice binders .

Floor trader - Thank you. I must say though that seeing your WW collection, as well as Rods, JKBLlue, and others here, actually served as inspiration for me to have a stab at the world. Absolutely no regrets either. Having more fun now than I can remember.

Nothing too earth shattering going on right now.

I did get a new batch of clear mounts today, so I was able to spend the evening mounting some stuff I had set aside because I didn't have the right size mounts.

So I was able to add 108 stamps to my various binders tonight.

Right now I am out of ink, so will get some cartridges tomorrow. Then I will either print pages for Brazil or print pages for Seychelles, which will actually be a re-mount project.

Several months ago I bought, from an online estate auction, about a dozen country collections on Steiner pages. Problem is that they appear to be older versions of Steiners pages and the boxes around the stamps are too tight compared to the newer files. Also, they used cover stock, which I do not like and doesn't match what I'm doing, so I will need to re-print new pages and re-mount all the collections.

The fun never ends!

One advantage of clear mounts is if you use a slightly larger mount than the stamp it is not as obvious. The stamp is less likely to look off center either.

Steiners pages haven't changed size wise, but depending on how you center & scale the pdf to fit whatever size of paper you are using, the boxes might shrink.

I am away from home now but my wife tells me that there are two big boxes on the doorstep. One is a WW collection (9900 stamps) that I purchased. The other is a set of Harris WW Statesman albums with pages. Can't wait to get home (to see the wife, of course).

Jack Kelley