Show Me Your Album Write-Ups

I'd love to see your write-ups – particularly those for topical albums, or those that are hand-written. Post away!

If you are looking for custom album pages with extensive information, checkout posts by PostmasterGS or Andy P.'s http://stamphacks.com

PostmasterGS has some excellent album pages.

Thank you angore!

I'm also interested to know what information people generally include, and what they leave out...

I use my wife as a guide. I add in a lot of information and then trim it down for space constraints, and ask my wife if she understands what this stamp is about. Since I'm Ukrainian, the top makes more sense to me. She is Irish, so hew knowledge of Ukrainian history and culture is much lower than mine.

For most of my descriptions, I find the Wikipedia article, if one exists, and borrow the first sentence or two. That's usually enough to explain what the stamp is about to people not familiar with the culture. Sometimes I have to go to Ukrainian Wikipedia, which is a lot of pain. I'm fluent in Ukrainian, but I am fluent in 1940s Ukrainian, because that's when my parents left Ukraine as kids. So, modern Ukrainian, I probably only get about 75-80% of, if it's West Ukrainian. If they're using Ukrainian that's spoken around the capitol city, Kyiv, then I get maybe half of it. Then I have to call my parents to help translate into US English.

This was a difficult page, took 6 hours to get all that info in.

Nice piece of work there John,
Not that I understand it as yet,
Need to study. Well done.

Rod,

the clarity of the scan is not that good.

The illustration at bottom right shows the two settings of a column of stamps with a vertical scratch affecting all units in the column. The dotted line in the illustration shows how the scratch moves from the left side to the right down the column.

The Victorian value die was reused as 'die 1' in the initial bi-colour Australian printings. It was worn and the die 2 value plate (for both the 1d and 2d) was created.

Flaws seen on the Victorian stamps are also found on the die 1 Australian issues of 1909.

My page shows the scratch flaws on the Victorian issue and then on the Australian issue. The scan is older, I now have the missing three stamps for the Austraian column.

64,
A very nice assembly of the scratch positions! In my opinion, a page on "The Scratch Flaw 1906-09", should have exactly that on the page. The column describing flaws in additional plate positions is off-topic, its position separates the main topic in to two areas, and should really be on another page with examples from those plate positions. This would give space for an example of "before the damage occurred".

Thanks John Becker (are you realy Ted Danson? Am I the first one to make that observation?).

The explanation of the scratch flaws extends to a few pages. There are also scratches in the adjacent column to the left.

Further, I have pages in preparation and research where the flaws before the appearance of the scratch flaw will be shown.

Everything is a work in progress and I have a few topics upon which I am working.

This is a great stamp collecting thread. Not that other threads aren't interesting or useful, but the collector who knows a few things and "writes them up," especially things which explain important details of the stamps they're showing, is doing real philately, as far as I'm concerned. My favorite collections aren't in printed albums, although I have to admit most of mine are that kind, but in personalized, home-made albums the collector has written up. Over the years, I've bought a few of these from long-ago collectors, and I love reading their insights, some of them personal. Some of their descriptions and comments are hand-written which I like even better. As long as they're handwriting is legible, of course. More I'd love to see.

I've seen some of Apastuszak's Ukraine pages which are very nice. And the page 64idgaf has created on "scratch flaws" is impressive. Try making another hundred of those! In an ideal world where we all had a lot of time, this is how stamps collections would look. I imagine, the more we see of pages like this, the more other collectors will be inspired to try the same thing.