Worldwide Cut Square Album - Anyone Seen This Before?

I got this old album in a box of Kelleher stuff. The binder was pretty beat up but it seemed to be in German and said Part II. It is very old and has spaces for cut squares from various countries. I show a couple pages below;





Has anyone else seen this before?

Thanks,

Ken

Yes! Mine was published by Schaubek, with cloth cover, around 1902 or so (I'm not near my stamp den currently so I don't have the specifics, but if you want them, I'll gladly supply them later). I bought mine as a young collector in London back in the early 1970's through one of the monthly mail auctions held by Ormond Stamps on Lamb's Conduit Street. Back then, I was already buying up old tyme collections and for some reason, such as the ornate cover and illustrate pages, this one struck my fancy. I still have the receipt and without digging it up, recall having spent around 10-quid for it at the time.
The pages were getting toned and a bit brittle, so years later I transferred all the cut squares that came with it into 3 Stanley Gibbons Tower Albums and added write-ups using the info from the pages they were on.
I kept the album partly because I enjoy "old stuff" related to the hobby, partly due to nostalgia, and partly as a reference for early world-wide postal stationary. It makes a great adjunct to my Higgins & Gage catalogues.

Edited to add, my edition is early enough so that when it was published, it was a single album (no part one or two).

On CD
Vendor Revenue-collector 2014 $13 +ship

Following is not meant in a negative way.

To my opinion these kind of early albums are part of why cut squares exist.

In all honesty: I personally do not like cut squares.

But I do know and appreciate, that there are many who collect them and are very passionate about them.

They sometimes have rare postmarks. That is a bonus.

But I still like complete postal stationery over cut squares.

I really do like cut squares! My understanding is that 19th century stamp albums often had spaces for them in among the stamps.

As a GB collector I think it's intersting that in the 1970s and 1980s, there would often be pictorial 'cut squares' in the same or similar style to current commemorative stamp sets. These are like the lost designs of the sets. Personally I think they have their appeal as quasi-stamps - stamps which never were.

Here are a couple of pictures of the old boy, one with the auction lot number still on it. Nostalgia aside, I just love the artistry that went into designing these old albums:

Nothing can touch those these days, although Schaubek does a rather attractive binder based on an old design

https://www.schaubek.de/Red-cloth-s...lgie-edition

Thanks for all the responses, I'm sure it's a Schaubek album. The pages seem to be ok with that hard paper Schaubek uses.

My binder is much plainer than the one shown and much more battered. There are probably 500 or so cut squares in it.

Yes, Ken, that's an old Schaubek album. It's from the olden days when cut squares were part of the mainstream of stamp collecting. Even the old Scott International albums, the ones now called the "Browns" which later turned into the well-known green Scott Specialty albums, used to include cut squares along with stamps. I've always assumed this was done because there weren't enough stamps to collect at the time, the time being the late 19th century. Maybe the same reason Christmas Seals once had pages in the older Scott National albums along with revenues and others which aren't even "postage" stamps? Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course! Once the number of actual postage stamps grew, collectors of cut squares declined in number and so cut square pages got dropped from mainstream stamp albums.

Also remember that the sellers of most stamp albums were stamp dealers as were catalogue publishers were, as well. So in order to have product to sell to collectors, stamp dealers included whatever they could get collectors to buy, After a few decades, when they had enough stamps to sell perhaps they didn't need to sell cut squares anymore to make a nice profit. Also, I imagine for many collectors, cut squares may have lacked some of the appeal of engraved and well-designed stamps (although I kind of like them for being embossed almost like coins). I think they're kind of neat, but I've never collected them. Too much to collect already.

That is a beautiful album with very nice pages layouts and done very elegantly. Modern albums seem too bland and bleak to me, lacking in attractive borders or pleasing layouts with too many stamps on a page, pages are often too small, and so on. Too bad yours doesn't have the original old binder in good shape. That might be worth a little money.

But if the hole punching fits a modern Schaubek binder, those pages might be reusable that way. Or, assuming there's no copyright infringement involved, maybe photocopy them onto all-blank paper of the same size and use those as a set of "new" pages. There are all sorts of ways to make stamp albums, and that would make for a very elegant album for someone who collects those things -- although it would only cover up to the date that album was published which would be a very long time ago. It's also interesting that at one time, apparently, there were at least a few collectors who tried to collect cut squares of the entire world! Now that's a different area to colllect.

I left the album in storage in NY but when I get back I'll post some more pages. There were quite a few (100s) of cut squares in it and many I've never seen before.

The binder is probably the original but it is not fancy and the post holes have penetrated the binder and been replaced with flexible brass paper clips.

I'll probably sell it as is sometime after I go back to NY.