Dormant Stamp Collector

Agree with PAPERHISTORY ,I started with various albums and progressed up to the Scott Internationals . That worked fine for a number of years . Then noticed too many stamp where being mounted on the page edges after decades of collecting in the Big Blues .

It was about 6 years ago ,it was time that I went to Steiner Pages and been happy with that .

I stopped collecting WW in the mid '90s due to my frustration with the available albums that I could afford. I moved from a Harris Statesman to a Minkus Comprehensive 2-volume set, and neither album met my needs.

With the oodles of stamps produced in the 25 years since then, I am sure the 2-volume Harris Statesman of today is even more compromised than my mid-90s version.

Now I am back in the game using Steiner pages and, for me, it's an ideal solution. So far, I've transferred about 4,000 stamps and out of those, only 30 or so did not have spaces for them on Steiner pages.

What's more, printing your own pages allows one to be certain about the archival quality of the paper used. I consider my Steiner-page albums to be the "forever" home of my stamps.

That said, if I were to collect WW only up through 1960 or so, it would be mighty tempting to find a lightly used Harris Citation or Standard from the mid-'60s, and transfer the pages into 3 or 4 new 2-post binders in thinner, handier sizes than the original Harris binders. But...did Harris use acid-free paper back then? Given that their Crystal Mounts turned out to be harmful to stamps, that would be a significant concern.

I understand the ease of using Steiner or similar pages, but they just look so awful. The computerised design takes no real account of how an attractive album page should look. Top-heavy, a mechanical, chronological plod .... awful. You can do so much better getting some quadrille or blank pages and doing it yourself.

You have solved the problem of what the paper will do to the stamps.

Time to start working on a solution for what the stamps will be doing to the paper.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey