Minkus Master Vs. Supreme -- How Can You Distinguish?

Is there any way to tell if a pre-1953ish Minkus page is from a Supreme vs. from a Master? I know the Scott Browns vs. Speciality vs. Blues can be easily distinguished by the border, hole shape, one vs. two sided, etc., but can the Minkus' be as easily distinguished? (I often get solo country pages, e.g., from club auctions, gifts, etc. and hoped to one day mount some of my duplicates in the pages and resell them -- but wanted to be sure to accurately identify the pages when I do.) Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

They look the same but page content is different with the Supreme (obviously) having better coverage/including more stamps from a particular period. I believe there are at least some pages that are the same for both albums.
https://goscf.com/t/53343

Why remount if you are reselling? ebay bidders who cannot personally inspect groups or collections on pages bid cheaply assuming the worst. It's a lot of work for that (though that's your call) and it's even more work to coordinate matching groups of pages.

Hi MillsapBaker,

I was reading an older discussion on the Minkus Supreme since I've been considering it as a "compact" option for a worldwide collection to 1973.

https://goscf.com/t/9917

I believe it was mentioned at one point that certain pages were identical in both the Supreme and the Master.

Hope it helps.

Dale

Thank you h-brasil and Statesman Stamper for your input. Looks like the individual pages were indistinguishable without knowing which stamps were only included in Supreme -- I as afraid of that.
I was hoping that perhaps only the Supreme had sporadic blank lines between rows of stamps to describe watermarks, dates, etc. -- or perhaps the perf spacing on the page boarders was different ;)
I had read all of the forum discussions that I could find when trying to decide which album to eventually house my collection. And certainly considered buying the reprints of the early pages, and getting a large, solid collection to pick-up more modern stamp pages. At the moment, I'm just picking up solid specialty Minkus pages to eventually incorporate -- once I happen upon a good, solid album collection to acquire. Thanks for your help.

Rereading my original post, I note that I left out an important bit that would have answered your question hy-brasil. I was interested, not just for resale, but actually to avoid too much stamp moving. You see, until I could find a good, solid Global Supreme collection (to about '90), I wanted to dabble without having to re-mount. So I was considering working a few individual countries -- buying several targeted collections, pulling the best ones, and mounting in pages that would eventually be incorporated into my final collection. I want to be sure that I was mounting them in Supreme pages (when I wasn't able to find a good specialty album) so that I wouldn't have to remount them -- I could just swap the pages en-mass. That would still leave me with country pages that would have my still mounted duplicates, that I could then resell.

At some point fairly recently, I believe, the seller of Minkus pages and albums stopped making two separate versions of the Minkus Global pages. For years, the Master Global had had fewer stamp spaces and the Master Supreme had had the larger number of spaces which was the whole point of the difference. Collectors could opt either for a basic collection of easily-found stamps or they could choose to have a more extensive collection with many more stamps. I don't think there is any easy way to determine whether a page is from one album or the other, but comparing pages from one album to another would show the difference. Not easy to do as you'd need an entire set of the album in one version or the other to make such comparisons. The version of, say, 1950 pages for Paraguay with more stamp spaces would be for the Supreme album, fewer spaces that leave out harder-to-get stamps would be for the Master album.

But at some point, Scott Publications which took over publishing the Minkus Global albums stopped printing the two versions of these pages, continuing to publish only one version for sale. I imagine it was the more extensive version, the Supreme album, but I'm not sure.

This same thing pretty much happened with the Scott International which had had spaces for only selected stamps that a collector could acquire without too much difficulty. This was the approach for many years with pages covering stamps past World War II, leaving out all the hard-to-get stamps in the early years up through about the 1940s or so.. But by the 1950s or 1960s (I'm not sure exactly), with stamps becoming easier to acquire, with fewer hard-to-get stamps, and very few rarities, Scott began printing pages for this same album with spaces for all stamps issued.

As for which date the change was made that eliminated the two versions of Minkus Global pages, maybe Scott Publishing can tell you. But I think it was sometime in the 1990s -- but that's a guess on my part based on when Scott took over the publishing of this album and when I remember hearing about the change being made in printing only one type of page. Obviously it's much easier to produce one type of page rather than two, and as for collectors, why not get the pages with more spaces on them?