Whats So Bad About Copy Paper?

Someone spoke of putting 20cent Volkswagen stamps on Rolls Royce papers. The point would be that if everyone takes no care to conserve Volkswagens they become much rarer. If you look at Toy collectors the old toys you recognise are usually all scratched and battered, the immaculate toys in the collections are the ones that showed up in the catalogues but you could only dream of owning them.

I guess it depends if there were 100 million or a billion of that toy produced as well.

The immaculate toys were the ones owned by sad children, though.

Beyond the "acidic" or "not acidic" issue which is clearly an important one, there's the even simpler question of paper weight. I can't imagine mounting stamps with hinges or stamp mounts on ordinary printer paper which is lightweight 20# paper. The floppiness and lack of support of that weight of paper is going to be a problem in supporting the stamps well, in turning the pages, and so on. When I've tried using printer-size paper in stamp albums (an experiment I disliked and eventually gave up on), I found that album paper only began to be useful when it got to around 60# or so. That weight of paper is commonly available in most office supply stores, and really not very expensive, so why not use it? But of course it's entirely your choice.

As for papers that are acidic or might otherwise damage stamps, the basic question is "Do you want to take a chance?" I certainly don't. My collections cost me lots of time and money and I'm proud of my collections. Why in the world would I want to take any chance on destroying them? It just seems like laziness or is it apathy to use the cheapest paper you can find if it damages your stamps. It's the kind of thing a child would do, or at least I did, anyway. As a nine or ten year old, I made some small albums out of ordinary school notebook paper. Talk about a mess. That paper -- and this was 50 years ago -- yellowed quickly, didn't support the stamps I mounted, and was just generally awful. Today's ordinary printer paper is probably better, maybe less acidic, but I don't know. So, to me the only common sense approach is to be suspicious of it and not use it.

If we had limited sources of quality paper, or if it were just way too expensive, we might use cheap paper and hope for the best. But there are many sources of "archival" paper that is reliably not going to yellow or brown and will last a very long time. All modern album makers sell this quality of paper, blank and printed, and some of it is not very expensive. Use those.

Unless your stamps are common stamps, for pure fun, and you don't plan to save them for long or give them away later, then do whatever makes you happy. Glue them to the wall if you want. Some early collectors actually did that. Yeah, I know, weird. There's nothing wrong with collecting common stamps purely for fun with no other thought to it. You or someone else will most likely end up throwing them away later, so no big deal. If that doesn't bother you, go for it. It's your collection. But if you keep them a lot longer, call me in 50 years and tell me how the cheap paper turned out.

Whatever happens after 50 years would still be considered anecdotal as it is today.

There are inherent risks (handling, mounting. temperature/humidity storage conditions, sunlight, insects, vacuum cleaners) that make any success or horror story a data point.