Plentiful And Inexpensive

Years ago this webpage got me restarted in worldwide stamp collecting. I don't know who the author is, but it was mentioned on the 'Filling Spaces" back in 2010. The link was dead, but Internet Wayback had it. I really enjoyed this little page and the advice it gave. Does anyone know the author? I wasn't able to link to the Wayback page but here is the text..
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Courtesy Internet Wayback.
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Welcome to my world wide stamp pages. This section deals with collecting world wide stamps in Scott International Albums. It is not a commercial for those albums, but rather a recognition that many collectors use them. So many, in fact, that dealers have a special category for "International Collections."

Presently I have my worldwide stamps on a "previously owned" set of Scott International pages which are kept in three-ring Scott Speciality Binders. The albums span the period from 1840-1995. There are around 10,000 stamps a year being issued, and Scott is keeping up to date with at least a volume a year. It is expensive to buy these albums new, which is why I'm getting them used.

Most recently I have begun replacing some of the Scott pages for the earlier issues with the "Brown International" pages which Subway offers for sale. Scott left out so many stamps from the early years that you often end up having long sets broken up with a few on the Scott pages and the rest on a blank page, or worse yet with the better stamps stuck on the Scott page but not in the correct spaces, or perhaps not in any space at all. These pages come in sections grouped by year. I got the 1840-1900 set for a bit over $100 (I don't have the price before me). They are printed on one side, never have more than one country on a page, and usually have separate pages for semis, airs, and dues.

Most stamps are not valuable and they are not expensive to buy. Certainly most that I have are not. I see in a current ad in Scott's Stamp Monthly offering 1000 different stamps for $16, or 3000 for $52, or 5000 for $88, and 10,000 with tongs and hinges for $197.16. I have seen 40,000 different worldwide for less than 3¢ each. They came mounted in order in booklets, so most of the price probably was the cost of sorting and mounting rather than the value of the stamps. I was recently offered a collection, in Scott Albums, of about 50,000 different for $1500. Much of that price was for the albums.

What does it mean to a collector that so many stamps are so inexpensive? It means you can have a huge collection with great variety of countries, subjects, and types of stamps for very little money. If you enjoy stamps, as I do, the inexpensive stamps are just as much fun to own as the great rarities. Certainly they offer the same panorama of history and culture that any stamp collection does. Here's some thoughts on buying stamps to get the most fun and stamps for your money.

Getting started How does one get started in world wide collecting? I'd suggest buying a collection in a Scott International album from a dealer at a show, or through ads in stamp mags or on the internet. (rec.collecting.stamps is a good source). Buy a cheap one. That is, one where the more valuable stamps have all been removed for sale. Remander collections of several thousand worldwide stamps in a Vol 1 album (1840-1940) can be had for $75-$200. I have bought several of these. Be sure to get the collection in a loose leaf album if you can. New the album to 1940 costs about $280 plus the binders which might add $100 more.

Why loose leaf? Because Scott leaves out a lot of stamps and you will get some of them. Scott and Subway make blank pages which are simple to add to loose-leaf binders and you can add whatever wonderful stamps you get that don't have printed spaces for. Another good accessory is interleaving - thin sheets of paper that go between the Scott pages to keep the stamps on facing pages from getting caught on each other as you look through the album.

I suggest buying a collection in an album because its so much easier to deal with stamps when you have them in an album. You can keep stamps on Hagner stock pages, but this gets expensive pretty quickly. As an alternative buy country collections "on pages" as they say. This will give you the pages for that country, for the period the collection covers. Punch these for a 3 ring binder and you've got your start on an album.

How many stamps are there? I don't think anyone knows, but Timothy P. Holls sent some interesting statistics to Stamp Collector, which published them as a letter to the editor in the Aug 13,2001 issue. Mr. Holls did a rough count of Scott listed major number stamps by adding up the highest catalog number in each country and category (eg regular, semi-postals, airmails etc) in the 2001 Scott. His total was 410,156 different stamps. Your total might differ, especially if you included minor varieties - many of which are listed in the Scott Classic catalog (1840-1940), or if you included locals. Still that's a good ball park figure. He did one other total which was staggering to me. He totalled the number of pages in his Minkus Supreme Global albums through the 1999 supplement. There were 22,014 pages, with spaces for 354,310 stamps (more or less).

Condition Most beginning collectors do not concern themselves greatly with condition. Collections you buy will reflect this. So too will packets, which are another great way to get stamps cheaply. The key for me has been to set myself some standards, and to try and upgrade the collection I have. In other words I take some stamps out of the collection because they are substandard. Others I replace when I can. However my basic criteria for admission to the collection are fairly low: if the stamp has its perforations, is not thin or creased, and the cancel doesn't wipe out the design, in it comes. I replace with copies that look fresher, have better centering or lighter cancels when I come across them. My collection is hinged. Hinges are cheap, and they work pretty well. The alternative is black mounts and the Scott pages, a least those I have, are too thin to hold them. The mounts gum bleeds onto the pages making them ugly and the mounts show through on the other side. I think the more recent Scott pages may be better suited to these mounts as the collecting of mint never hinged stamps is most easily done with recent stamps.


Tips for buying stamps The most expensive way to buy stamps is to get them one at a time, or set at a time. The least expensive way is to buy packets, or collections which a collector created. I have bought some excellent worldwide and country collections on-line at < http://pages.ebay.com/catindex/stamps.html> and in the real world at my local stamp club, at dealers, and from dealers at stamp shows. I've paid between $5-$25 dollars for collections with hundreds of stamps from one country or another, and I've always been happy with the stamps when I got them home. The going price for a Scott International Vol 1 (1840-1940) with a lot of cheap stamps in it is about $75 to $100.

Dunes. In the 1960s as stamp issues began to skyrocket the "Trucial States" located in the desert regions near the Arabian Gulf suddenly began to issue stamps. Quite a few stamps. And stamps usually with high topical interest. Perf, imperf, CTO and mint. Considering that these places had slight to no postal service, or even perhaps population, the stamps gained a reputation as being second rate issues. Scott refused to catalog them. Still they were popular among topical collectors and plentiful, so they show up all the time. I recently got the Trucial States Catalog (1976 Edition). Like the stamps it is suspect. The printing appears to be poor photocopies. It lists only issues by some of the Dunes countries, and only up to about 1973, but it still does contain over 10,000 stamps. Here are the countries and totals:
Trucial States 11
United Arab Emirates 35
Abu Dhabi 84
Ajman 2873
Dubai 423
Fujeira 1508
Khor Fukkan 231 (some overprints on Sharjah)
Manama 1508
Ras Al Khaima 1036
Sharjah 1247
Umm Al Qwain 1507

I got the catalog because I do have some of these stamps and wanted to be able to put them in order on blank pages in my albums. Good hunting.

I cannot answer your question. But I enjoyed reading the narrative. Thanks landoquakes.

I left the Scott blue internationals years ago, but I have fond memories of filling the pages. Even now I still look at the videos/pfds of some of the big blue collections offered in auctions.

As in narrative, I got too frustrated with missing spaces. So instead of buying used international pages and binders, I bought used Scott specialty pages and binders. It took many years but finally I consider myself as having competed the specialty pages worldwide to at least 1960.

The author is Ed Denson. He may be the well known record label owner/producer but I haven't verified. In any event, an interesting and still relevant article. Thanks for posting.

As mention above ,this was written many years ago . The world has moved on .

Today collectors who attempt to collect the world look toward STEINER PAGES . Scott publishing with Their International 's has trouble with space ,weight and cost made it a turn off .

The author is correct ,to start a W.W. collection buy 2 or 3 International's but after that your buying 80% duplicates with the next one's you buy .

Ed Denson was also one of the early (PNC) Plate Number Coil specialists. Catalog author and dealer. Also music producer and later an attorney. Living in the hills of Northern CA. and representing the Farming community. However, I do not know if he is the one who wrote the article.

If Mr Denson the stamp collector and Mr Denson the record producer are one and the same, I'm in his debt. The Takoma LP of Bukka White has been in my collection in one form or another for over fifty years.

According to a bio offer by alechtron.com, Denson the music producer was also the philatelist mentioned. Text below is direct from that website and unedited.

Biography
Denson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1940. His parents were civil servants, and they had a succession of homes in suburbs of Washington in Montgomery County, Maryland, each home being a bit larger and a bit farther from the city. He has one sister, Helen, who is four years younger. Denson was educated in the public schools, except for one year at Fishburne Military School. While attending the University of Maryland, in College Park, intending to study physics, he became interested in folk music and learned much from the record collector Dick Spottswood. He met John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Max Ochs—all folk guitarists—before leaving for the West Coast with his first wife, the guitarist and singer Pat Sullivan. There he became a student of English, first at Merritt College, then at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. In the late 1960s, Denson and his first wife divorced, and he married Gloria Naramatsu. They remained together for a decade, living in a brown shingle house in the Oakland foothills. They divorced in the late 1970s, and she moved to Washington State when she remarried, and became the Postmaster of the town in which she and her husband live. Pat Sullivan, it is reported, died of a heart attack in the mid-1990s. Denson and Mary Alice Sexton moved to a 30 acre "ranch" in Alderpoint, a small ex-mill town in northern California, where they were married soon after and where they live today.

Music
Around 1963, in the wake of Fahey's location of Bukka White, Denson and John Fahey set up Takoma Records with Norman Pierce as their first distributor. The label was a pioneer of what was to become the Indie records movement. Denson produced one or two of Fahey's early albums for the label, and by getting Tom Weller to design psychedelic covers for them helped shape John's early image. He brought Robbie Basho to the label. In the early 1960s, he was the road manager for the Blues Project and then for Mississippi John Hurt, helped manage and produce records of Bukka White, and Skip James, after Fahey located White and James was found by a folklorist in Mississippi. He sold his interest in Takoma records to Fahey in the mid-1960s.

In the mid-1960s, Denson expanded his management activities into rock and, with Country Joe McDonald, published a magazine, Rag Baby. He was also music columnist for the Berkeley Barb in this period. As a founder of the University's Pretentious Folk Front he produced a concert featuring Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs. From around 1965 to 1970 he managed Country Joe & the Fish and Joy of Cooking. In 1972 Denson and Stefan Grossman founded and managed Kicking Mule Records, which at first released acoustic guitar instrumentals with tablature and later branched out to include artists such as John Renbourn, Michael Bloomfield, and Charlie Musselwhite. Denson has been involved in radio work since the 1960s, when he and Michael Sunday produced a late-night show on KPFA in Berkeley. Since 1982, he has hosted folk and blues radio shows, first on station KERG, in Redway, California, and then briefly on KHSU at Humboldt State University in Arcata, and, since shortly after it went on-air, KMUD, in Garberville. His show is streamed on kmud.org Saturday mornings 9:30–11:30 am, Pacific time. At 25 songs per show, he estimated he had played over 42,000 tunes as of the end of 2016.

During the 1970s, Denson spent several summers as a volunteer river guide with Bill McGinnis's Whitewater Voyages, primarily working with inflatable kayaks. He was a guide on the South Fork of the American and Klamath rivers usually, and on one Klamath trip met Mary Alice Sexton, who later became his third wife. In the summer of 1980 they ran the Grand Canyon on a month-long private trip with Bill McGinnis and two other guides.

He and Mary Alice moved to Humboldt County in 1980 and for 15 years operated Kicking Mule records from the barn on their ranch. After dividing the masters with his partner, Stefan Grossman, in 1995, he sold the remaining masters and the label to Fantasy Records, so that he could devote his time to a new career, lawyering. In the mid-1980s Denson became involved in the civil rights movement occasioned by the government's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) and the marijuana eradication raids in southern Humboldt County. He was president of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project (CLMP) for many years, and became a nonviolence preparer for the Citizens Observation Group (COG). In that capacity he travelled extensively in southern Humboldt County, training over 200 people in nonviolent techniques to use while monitoring police activity during marijuana raids. In 1990 after extensive litigation by CLMP, the government signed a consent decree to alter their raiding techniques, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Ron Sinoway and Mel Pearlston. It was this which inspired Denson to start studying law in 1995.

Legal and political work
In 1992, Denson ran for Humboldt County supervisor, but came in fourth in a field of eight. Nevertheless, the run was important for establishing the political clout of the "new settlers" who lived in rural sections of southern Humboldt County, one of whom, Estelle Fennell, was elected to the post in 2012 in what could be seen as a passing of political power from the older establishment. He received an inheritance, following his mother's death in 1994, which allowed him to study law. In 1995 he enrolled in William Howard Taft University, a mail-order law school, graduating in January 1999. He passed the California Bar Exam that month and in August 1999 was sworn in as an attorney. His practice for the first 16 years had been focused on defense of people charged with marijuana crimes or driving under the influence of drugs. He has also represented, pro bono, activists arrested during protests of logging practices in the old-growth redwoods and, more recently, protesting the environmental impacts of the Willits bypass construction on US Highway 101. He has given public lectures on California's medical marijuana law to patients and their caregivers and hosts a monthly hour-long talk show on the topic, on a community radio station, KMUD. In 2006 he went to China as part of a Global Volunteers program and gave lectures on the American legal system to university students in Xi'an. In 2016, as cannabis law changed, relatively few cannabis arrests were made locally, and his law practice shifted from primarily criminal defense to counseling people who wanted Commercial Cannabis Cultivation permits under the Humboldt county ordinance. Perhaps 70-75 of his clients beat the December 31, 2016 deadline for applications to be filed. In 2017 he is primarily working with clients wanting State of California Cannabis Business licenses, but maintains his criminal defense practice as well.

Health
In early 2011, Denson received a diagnosis of cancer of the tongue and underwent eight weeks of chemotherapy and radiation to treat it. His doctors are optimistic, and the cancer appears to be gone, but he started five years of "cancer probation" (as the legal mind would call it) on April 1, 2011. He is now cancer-free in his sixth year of recovery, and sees each of his three doctors twice a year. Since his treatment began, he has published a daily diary of his experiences in treatment and recovery on his Facebook page.

Travel
All of his life Denson has travelled, mainly in the lower 48 states of the United States until the 21st century, with a couple of brief trips to Europe as manager of Country Joe & the Fish. Around 2004, he and his wife began travelling the world, mainly by ship. He has been to every continent, she to six, missing Africa due to illness. They have taken 18 cruises, the latest being a Pacific coast cruise in 2015, from Vancouver, BC, to Los Angeles. He published extensive writings and many photographs on a travel blog, almost all of which is now lost to history as the blog host pulled the plug after several years, and most of the written material was not backed up. Denson's Facebook page contains some of the later travel writings.

Philately
An avid and lifelong (with intervals) stamp collector, Denson became interested in the philately of the Falkland Islands when he visited there in 2005. His collecting now focuses primarily on stamps from that area. He has in the past formed collections of German stamps, specialized in the US 1890 issue (Scott 219-229), collected Swedish stamps, and US Plate Number Coils (PNC). He published a catalog of PNC First Day Covers and has written articles on the US 1890 issue, early US machine cancellations, and Falkland Islands registration labels for several philatelic publications. Denson shared the Luff award for his philatelic writing on US First Day Covers. A nit picker, he has convinced the editors of Scott's Standard Catalog of Postage Stamps, and West's Annotated California Codes to make minor but important corrections to their publications. He is currently working on a project to update the categorization of the registration labels and markings used by the postal system of the Falkland Islands, and to try to determine their periods of use, and relative rarity. Publication of this research can been read at "Falkland Philately" on Blogger. The work was the basis for the illustrated list of label types in the 6th edition (2012) of the Heijtz catalog. His latest publication on-line is "Registration Labels on covers of the Falkland Island's Coronation Issue of 1937" also at "Falkland Philately." He is working on a Monograph on Falkland Islands Registration labels for the Falkland Islands Philatelic Study Group, slowly.

Wow! Thank you everyone for the great detail! Ed penned a very inspiring article. In an odd way, I tried to go with Steiner pages first and bought a subscription, starting from scratch though it was way too daunting so I got ahold of a SI volume 1. I needed the photos on the pages big time. I spend a lot of time stripping down Steiner pages into my SI set.