Stamp Album Recommendations?

I concur with uboatnut's suggestion to take a look at AlbumEasy. When I retired and starting looking at my collection again about three years ago I agonized over the whole what to do about an album question. I sent away for samples, played with making my own in Adobe, etc. In the end I found Album Easy was the answer.

And as has also been suggested an idea which I see from time to time is to just use a stock book, even just stock pages with your own binder. Personally not my preference but might work for you.

As for spending more $ on the album than the stamps that are in it, I think if we had a competition I'd finish somewhere near the top of that, but I really get as much enjoyment out of what I'm doing with my albums as I do from the actual stamps.

Good luck!

The create your own approach for worldwide collecting allows you to control the cost rather than deal with the upfront cost pre-printed albums. The second challenge is having a catalog if you are interested in tracking, valuing, and buying more. A new set of Scott catalogs (12 books) is expensive. If you go pre-printed route, I recommend you think about how to expand since obviously these condensed albums lack space.

I tried collecting stamps of the German Reich in a stock book. I thought it wasn't much fun. Too much time guessing which one goes before which other one. Much more fun when I bought a cheap album. Now I often wish I had maybe bought a more expensive album. As for it being not sensible to spend more on albums than the stamps are worth, what is so sensible about the whole enterprise if collecting little bits of paper from long ago and far away?

My guess is a lot of stamp collectors have a range of OCD tendencies :-)

For me, having an 8 volume Scott National album set for US stamps didn't take long to root my "passion" to complete volumes 2-8.

I can see where a stock book would be good starting out, it just depends on the intention and where one plans to focus.