Pushing 330,000 All Different Worldwide Stamps In One Collection .

A spike in the ekg?

There was a big spike in prices for low end philatelic items in the marketplace maybe not a sine wave move but a huge change in direction 1999 thru 2010 with the ebay website . Many collectors and me included were selling at full retail and cleaning out huge stocks of unwanted material. .

I think what we are seeing is the retirement of the baby boomers who are the last great generation to collect. And what do you do in retirement? Collect stamps of course. The Stamp Dragons is afraid that following generations - genX, millennials and Y are not large collectors in mass. I expect another drop or
a further move east of the worlds great collections.

floortrader I don't know if this has already been asked....but for these world stamps collections, do you only use a general world catalog or do you also use more specific or specialized catalogs for some regions or countries ?

Jurgesurcl----- I have 10 to 12 specialized catalogs and two sets of A-Z Scott Catalogs 2022 and 2019 sets ..

I don't use the specialized catalogs much . Most of cataloging is with the favorite of mine two Scott Classics 1840-1940 .
Spend my time building a decent worldwide collection with a special effort to collect those hard to find stamps and those long complete sets that many collectors are missing . There are a few countries that I hope to fill in this next year which I have done very little with over the past years but will make a special effort on in 2025 ..

JORGESURCL ---- To answer your question further , I try to stay away from ,going to deep into specialising as many other collectors have done . The goal has been to see how far down the path I could go of being a WORLDWIDE COLLECTOR .

Can anybody guide me in using albumeasy to modify steiner pages ? I am trying to add some supplemental pages to my 1947 bigblue by adding a heading, stamp boxes and minimal texts. I want to create personalized pages for the stamps that I have and print them on blank scott international pages to insert in my bigblue.
Thanks much
Kingshuk

I've not used AlbumEasy, though it is a well thought of program.

I use Steiner pages (formatted as 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheets) and have Harris Citation Albums, which have a 9 x 12 inch page size. I use the draw program in the free LibreOffice application https://www.libreoffice.org/ to modify the Steiner pages to 9 x 12 inch page size. I can move boxes around or add new boxes on blank pages, and add new headings and text. The blank album pages available for Harris albums are junk, so I use 11 x 17 inch ledger paper, put the 9 x 12 inch Harris page in the center as a text box, and then trim it down after printing. I have a printer than can work with ledger sized sheets, otherwise one can take the file to a print shop.

floortrader
Thanks for your response.
I would have loved to make a worldwide stamp collection, but only until 1970 or 80.
But now I don't have years left to try.
I was asking about the catalogs because even among the big 4 worldwide catalogs (Scott-Michel-SG-Yvert et Tellier) there are differences in what they include or do not include in same countries.
Scott for example, includes US stamps with his own number to stamps that others not includes.
For some countries Michel includes stamps than the others ignore or not consider.
In the case of my country (First Issues 1853-1867) some of these catalogs consider as a "type stamp", with its own number, a stamp that here for us, is just a color variant

Interesting approach Moneil. WHat kind of ledger paper do you use?

@aragorn, I'm not sure that one can easily convert Steiner pages into AlbumEasy code. Not from the Steiner PDF's anyway.

Although I'm watching this thread closely just in case!

The LibreOffice path seems to give folks some success, as you are keeping things in a visual frame of reference (select text, change text, etc.) But you're likely doing the same thing on each page - the same font changes, the same re-positioning, etc. - which would cause me mental trauma, especially as my mouse hand slips and a heading is 2mm to the right of every other page, and on and on. I'm sweating just thinking about it.

Of course they are, it's a posed photo. Essentially it's an advertising plug photo.

One thing a WW collector can do to make life more simple is to not collect every variety of the same stamp. I noticed that an old Shaubek album converted into Steiner disregarded many of the watermarked varieties. Perf varieties is another one. Less egregious is that the WW collector can also scrutinize endless overprint varieties. One would be surprised how few original artworks there are in the classic era.

For US collecting you can spend 10 cents to 50 dollars for a stamp or you can spend hundreds to thousands or more for the same stamp with a grill on it.