Combine Albums Or Leave Separate?

I own a 1975 Harris Travelers, 1978 Senior Statesman, and a 2010 Statesman Deluxe album. Each contains stamp illustrations for inserting stamps up to that album's year. What are your thoughts on combining the albums alphabetically in order to track inventory and want lists, or leaving the albums separate and adding new pages as I need them? 95% of the stamps are or would be hinged, the other 5% would be mounted.

I would suggest you keep whichever has the best coverage of older issues, probably the 78 Statesman, unless you are truly interested in collecting stamps from the 80's, 90's, etc. I had a Traveler as a teen, probably the weakest...so why keep? Combine the contents to one. Just one opinion.

The thing about all of those Harris albums is that they are heavily edited to keep the final product to a certain number of pages/spaces. A 1980 edition of the Statesman would have good coverage of 1970s issues, some 1960s issues, and poor coverage of anything before, for example. A 1990-edition Statesman would have many pages for 1980s issues, fewer for 1970s issues, and so on.

So you'll probably get the "best" coverage by combining the albums into one.

I would also suggest to base the collection around the 1978 Senior Statesman pages as it probably has the best coverage of the 3 albums.

I find interleaving to be too fragile and rather bulky. So you might also think about going to single-sided style add-on pages if certain sections get particularly well-filled. This is to prevent stamps on facing pages damaging each other. So then a blank or quadrille page has the stamps mounted on it but the left page facing it is the printed guide for what stamps go where.

I concur, I would combine them too. Were supplements used in any of them? if so, you would have a nice snapshot of that particular year. Thankfully Harris supplements are cheaper, but heavily abridged. You can even find old ones from time to time and the coverage wasn't too bad really up to the early 2000's. I would go with hinges for Harris pages, mounts cause them to sag, unless used sparingly.

You're proposing to combine pages from different albums which will be redundant in some ways. Each of those albums has spaces for many of the same stamps. And they're not on separate pages so you can't omit some pages completely -- or add pages from another album after them. Pages from album B will repeat many of the same stamp spaces from album A, and so on. Try as you might, you'll end up with duplicates all over the place.

If you can mount all your stamps in one of the albums (the larger one, presumably), then use it, and get rid of the others.

I know what I'd do. I'd start over with the biggest and most inclusive new or used album I could buy, Harris or not. Then transfer my stamps. Everyone needs a "project," don't they?

Thanks for all of your advice. Most of my stamps and duplicates will fit in the Senior Statesman and newer Statesman albums. I may just sell one binder if I have too many duplicate pages.