Adding Supplemental Information To Albums

I had planned to create custom country title pages with supplemental country history for my albums and then it dawned on my that the APS journal had a regular column with one page write ups. So, downloaded them and added to the album. I also printed some on the backside of the title page directly from journal PDF A goal has been to have more supporting information (watermarks, etc) so remind me when I revisit the country.

Cool. Th info on the back of the title page would be nice to have. Is the pdf for members only?

That's a terrific idea !

I've been doing that for years; still another reason why I use Steiner pages!
With Steiner pages you have control of your own album and do not have to fret over what other album makers may or may not provide.

There are some minor tweaks I'd love to do to Steiner pages. One of them would be to bold the name of the country on the top of each page.

I had a plan years ago to write descriptions for Steiner pages that you could print on the back of the page. It would have made the album a little more like the Mystic Heirloom, with descriptions on the left and the stamps on the right.

Here is some descriptions I did for the 2009 Steiner US Supplement.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4bf87b8ns...ons.pdf?dl=0

I don't know if they match up with the pages exactly. I never went farther than this.

There's a certain "art" to laying out a stamp page that becomes a lot harder when you put descriptions under or around the stamps. Putting them on the adjacent page allows you to layout the page better and do longer descriptions.

Too much is overkill. Too little is confusing. These are the main problems with adding information to albums. Knowing the right amount is, apparently, not easy for most people to figure out.

I've seen a lot of home-made albums where every stamp or set of stamps gets a little essay describing it. Does the collector really think people are going to read all that information? Probably not. The same goes for stamp exhibitions where there are pages of much-too-long information viewers will not likely read. It's all about the stamps, not about showing off information you've found out about them. Most viewers of stamp exhibits simply aren't going to stand there and read, page by page, your lengthy explanations of hand-laid paper, Nepalese royal mail carriers, or steamboat routes of the Amazon. The same goes for a simple U.S. album where a collector insists on telling the hypothetical viewer who Andrew Jackson is (duh!), when he lived, where he lived, what he did, and why the stamp was issued. It's not necessary. Yet collectors get so impressed with the fact that they know stuff that they overkill and ruin their album.

On the other hand, most printed albums lack anywhere near enough information about the stamps they provide spaces for. Most albums just have a space and maybe -- maybe -- a title identifying the subject of the stamp. High-quality home-made albums, the blank page or quadrille page kind made by collectors, generally identify the stamp subject, the perfs, and maybe whether engraved (or otherwise), an d maybe also the engraver or designer of the stamp. And very little else. A few short words about why the stamp was issued (to raise funds for . . .) might be good, but not usually. I've seen collections where the collector made sure that every single commemorative was identified as a "commemorative honoring . . . .". Gosh, who would have guessed! Or identified as a "postage stamp for . . . . ". It's clearly a stamp. You don't need to tell the viewer it's a stamp. Or a commemorative. Writing in complete sentences is recommended when writing essays, but not in a stamp album. Please. Just use short simply descriptions. And less is nearly always more.

These helpful tips brought to you by a collector who has a tendency to get a bit long-winded. So what do I know?

Golden rule of design...

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

But of course this only applies to a design that you want others to like. If a person is designing something only for themselves, then they should do whatever they want.
Don

The amount of information to provide on a page all depends on the purpose of the collection and who the audience is.

For a display of stamps in catalog order minimal text might be appropriate. You may want a lot more text if it is a study collection of printing varieties, etc.

If only you are going to look at the album you probably need less text than if other persons will be looking at it, especially if they are not collectors. And the text may completely different for an exhibition.

Since you mentioned this with regard to exhibits, I am compelled to answer. Exhibits are one of my favorite sources for learning new information. Exhibits (or just album pages) that are archived somewhere on some website where I can download them and study them at my own pace. So if someone has made some good progress on researching something, I'd sure hope to see it written down.

While I was mostly immobile due to a back injury a couple weeks ago, I was studying some of Arthur White's album pages from Siegel's website. A treasure trove of information. I'm happy he went to the trouble of documenting things so well.

I doubt the majority of collectors show their albums to anyone else unless it is for some formal exhibit. Everyone has their own standard.

Since I do not commit everything to memory, inserts into albums allow a quick refresh such as for watermarks, die varieties, etc. My goal is to not have it look like a messy scrapbook. Some adds are temporary until I create something custom.

@Timm: "with Steiner pages, you have control of your own album......."

Same thing occurs with blank, quadrille, pages. Steiner pages are too small for my Big Blue, Scott International, binders. I use a combination of Scott International pages, printed and blank, including Vintage; and trimmed down Scott Specialty pages. I identify varieties, watermarks, plate flaws, Scott numbers, etc., in pencil when appropriate. I'm the only person who sees my albums, but I want them to flow well and not have a lot of superfluous information. Primary specialties are Portugal & colonies, Mexico, Poland.

The default Steiner page size is 8.5 x 11 inches, but just as one can modify the Steiner page layout and add additional information, one can also adjust the page size.

I have Harris albums which have a 9 x 12 inch page size. I open the Steiner pdf with the LibreOffice Draw program, adjust the page size from 8.5 x 11 inches to 9 x 12 inches (I've never had to change the margins, they come out fine), and drag the boarder to fit the new page size. I export the file from LibreOffice Draw as a pdf and print on either blank Harris refill pages (in which case I delete the boarder as the blank album pages from Whitman Publishing have their own boarder) or on 9 x 12 inch card stock which I or the print shop have cut down from 11 x 17 inch ledger size.

I recently purchased a wide format printer (which I'll write a review of later), but before that I would take a thumb drive to most any print shop, bringing my own 9 x 12 paper, and have the pages printed for around 15 cents plus paper cost, using a print shop coupon whenever possible. As I recall, this approach was often less expensive than buying annual supplements, and I had control over both the page layout and the paper quality.

Just another idea ...

Or "with Steiner pages, the Scott catalogue has control of your album" ...

Like Steve, I use quadrille alongside, or in preference to, printed pages. The information added will vary not just between collector and collector, but also within a collection. If I were adding information to pages of, say, France, I could err on the side of the minimal. If I were adding information to pages of the Hejaz, what I would write would reflect my ignorance of Arabic and my need for greater explanatory detail. But there's no right or wrong. This is ultimately trivia to fill in your time - fill your time and your album as you wish.

Steiner includes spaces for many minor varieties that you will never see in a Scott published album and some page layouts do not follow Scott layouts so it is better than Scott's products in completeness.

Well, I make pages for other people to use. And I make pages for Ukraine. Hell, my parents tortured me in the US by sending me to Saturday Ukrainian School, and I still don't know 3/4 the subject of 3/4 of Ukraine's output. On top of that, the stamps themselves are in Cyrillic, so it's not easy to just Google. I think anywhere from 1-2 sentences is more than enough, depending on the topic. If it's a souvenir sheet or a se-tenant, I tend to write more, since there are more stamps to decide.

One of my guides is "If I remove the descriptions, could I fit more stamps on the page?" If the answer is "definitely," then I have written too much. If it's maybe, I will double check what I have written to see if it can be shortened and still make sense. If the answer is no, then I leave it alone.

I also have the advantage of having an Irish-American wife who knows very little about Ukrainian history and culture (other than what she has learned from me through the years), so she's an excellent judge of wether I have written enough or not. I want enough there so people have a rough idea what the stamp is about, without so much that they don't want to be bothered to read it.