My primary US collection is mint, unless prohibitively expensive, and is housed in the first five volumes of the hingeless Mystic American Heirloom albums. There are a few (very few) issues from 2000 up that I like and have acquired and they are housed in a stock book.
I was recently looking through the large number of used US issues that I have managed to accumulate (probably around 7-8,000 including duplicates) and decided to buy some dedicated albums for them. Although I was originally going to get the Harris Liberty albums in 3-ring binders, I ended up going with the non-hingeless version of the Mystic American Heirloom albums in three volumes, which go up to 2018. All the stamps in the albums will be used and I'm not going to buy any stamps specifically for this collection but, instead, rely on accumulations and collections that I buy as well as stamps off my incoming mail.
As I receive quite a bit of philatelic mail, I have a pretty good selection of recent stamps. This brings me to my first problem with the Heirloom albums, they only have places for souvenir sheets and not the individual stamps from the sheets. As I'm not likely to run across many postally used sheets, this presents a definite problem for me. I can work around this by placing the stamp over the spot on the sheet, but this is not optimal. I could use blank Mystic sheets, but I hate the look of blank sheets and much prefer printed commercial albums. This rules out using Steiner pages as well because I like pages which have the stamp pictured in the box. Does anyone here have the latest versions of the Harris Liberty albums? Do they have places for the individual stamps from the sheets? I'm not totally adverse to purchasing a set if they better fit my needs.
My other problem with the Heirloom albums is that they arrived vastly overstuffed, to the point of being almost unusable. By the time you add a reasonable amount of stamps, they will be. This problem is easily overcome, though, by purchasing another binder. I went through and removed about 75-80 pages from each binder and transferred them to the next one. This, of course, left me with a little over 200 pages not in a binder. I had enough reward points to get a free binder and, as I have a good number of 2019 issues waiting for the Pure Citrus treatment, ordered the 2019 supplement as well. I don't really know when, or if, I will stop buying supplements but, as long as I keep receiving current issues on my mail, will probably continue to do so. As far as trying to keep up with and purchase all the new issues being released in mint condition, I think that I'll pass and keep my cutoff date at 1999. |
Posted 12/27/2019 6:53 pm
