I did exactly what you're doing just a few years ago. I bought one volume of a nice used Minkus Global Supreme album to see what I thought of it. I also bought some used Scott International pages. I also considered some of the old Big Brown Scott International volumes with the sewn bindings, but the pages seemed thin, and I figured the sewn bindings were going to end up bulging with all the stamps I put into them. I was a subscriber at the time to Bill Steiner's wonderful print-yourself album pages, so I considered those, too. Pretty much what you're now doing.
Steiner pages are an amazing thing, and I've used them to supplement some of my other albums, mostly Scott Specialty albums, where I can't find (or can't afford) missing pages. I print the Steiner pages on Specialty-sized paper and they look fine. I once printed out an entire country on Steiner pages and ended up with five (5) loose-leaf volumes on 3-hole pages, too many volumes for a country that issued relatively few stamps. And I didn't like the look of the smaller 8.5 x 11" inch paper I was using or the three hole punching. They looked cheap to me, like a school kid's notebook. I wanted my albums to look more elegant. Steiner pages can be printed on larger paper, too, but printing out the world on Steiner pages would produce a hundred or more volumes, I think, and that would be completely unwieldy. And I don't like Steiner's overly simple page design. Fancy borders seem more elegant to me (one reason Minkus borders seem kind of childish). Steiner pages are sometimes also a little too crowded for my taste (not that other albums don't have this same problem!). So, as much as I like Steiner pages for some uses, as a worldwide album they clearly weren't going to work for me.
The Minkus Global album was comprehensive with spaces for nearly all stamps, including many I'd never find or could never afford. But the page layouts! Good lord, the overcrowding was awful. This must have been done to save money by having fewer pages. Adn the paper was pretty thin.
In the heyday of the Scott-Minkus "wars" in the 1960s and 1970s, Scott was printed on heavier paper with uncluttered page layouts and sold at higher prices. It was the "sophisticated adult collector's" stamp album. Minkus, on the other hand, was printed on thinner paper (so more pages could fit in each volume) with more crowded page layouts. It sold at lower prices. Minkus albums, including their single-country specialty albums, were always positioned as "everyman's albums" for ordinary collectors moving up from beginner's albums but who couldn't afford Scott quality and Scott prices. I owned a few of them in the day, and they weren't bad. But Scott was always the better album.
The Scott International has less crowded pages which look much better to me. It's printed on heavier paper, so it seems more sturdy. My main problem with the Scott International was the price (not cheap at all) and the large size of the binders which I found too big to pick up easily. Even their standard binder which holds 300-350 pages is very large. But the Minkus binders are even larger, so on binder size, Scott was certainly no worse.
Subway Stamp Shop used to make and sell a smaller version of the Scott International binder which held 200-250 pages and was only 2.5" thick. It was much easier to handle. You would need to buy more binders to hold all your pages, of course. But, in any case, it was out of print. However, one lucky day I found thirty (30) of them for sale on
ebay. By this time I'd decided that the Scott International pages were what I preferred, so finding these smaller binders made my decision a lot easier.
Subway Stamp Shop --
Please bring back these binders!! I would still use the Scott International pages even if I had to use the larger volumes.
Minkus supplements have also gone in and out of print a few times which might be a concern to some. Scott International supplements have always remained in print.
What about the famous incompleteness problem in Scott Internationals? They do have fewer spaces for stamps than the Minkus Global, but I have only rarely found this to be a problem. Scott omits higher values from some sets and omits rarer stamps in the period before about the 1940s or so. I either mount these stamps on an empty part of the Scott page or I add a blank page. For me, given the other advantages of the Scott album, this is just not a serious problem . Since the missing stamps are generally less common or more expensive, I don't have that many spaces missing . I agree it can be frustrating when the top values of a set I want to mount are missing spaces - but in my experience, it's not that common.
Scott's omitted stamp spaces are generally before the 1940s. After that, Scott pages include spaces for all stamps. So the difference between Minkus and Scott is not as great as you might think. That means that 100% of stamps from about 1945 onward will have spaces in Scott Internationals. I collect worldwide up to 1975, and for the worldwide flood of stamps that were issued in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Scott albums have spaces for all of them. In any case, my goal has never been completeness so much as it is having a complete-looking and nicely-presented collection, and the Scott International provides that.
If you're truly obsessed and want 100% completeness, you could always buy the Subway "Vintage Reproduction" version of Scott International pages which include spaces for all stamps from 1840-1940. It's a copy of the old Brown album pages. And then continue your album with regular Scott pages from then on. But if you do this, your page total is going to become huge, so you'll need dozens of binders. I considered this, but it seemed overwhelming and I'm nowhere rich enough to afford all those less common stamps, so it didn't really seem necessary.
Posted 09/29/2019 7:18 pm
