Minkus Supreme Global Albums (The Big Red Thread)

The shop where I got the two binders has a 3 set Supreme set with the box. I have no idea what the year or how many stamps are included. Asking $280. I'll have to go have a look. It was underneath a few albums stacked on top and I had already found the two that add to mine. I purchased 100 glassine pages from Amazon that I'll punch to fit. Had a gift card so no money spent. About the same cost as I saw at stamp sites but no shipping cost with my Amazon account. Should be here this week so we'll see. I think they are a must especially when facing pages have stamps. Now I also get to use the 4 packs of Dennison hinges I picked up for $1 awhile back!

BSC I am quite surprised you found an actual retail stamp shop.

I agree that finding a retail store these days is pretty special and rare to find a 3 volume Supreme Global set in the box. The key is of course how many stamps are in there!

Here's what the 2 volume box looked like.

Hello. This is my first post here. I recently purchased Amos reprints of the Minkus supreme global stamp albums part 1-6 (1840-1976). I finally have finished moving my collection to these new pages and have had a blast. I saw this old thread and wondered if anyone else is using Minkus for their global collection?

Welcome to the forum! I am in a long process of building a Minkus Supreme run to 1976 too. How many binders does the Amos pages take? Are they all one sided? Here's an example of the first page of the Virgin Islands for the two volume Supreme Global.

Gbgolf --- Welcome to the board . Sounds like it is going to be fun long term project with those albums .

Landoquakes ---- Congratulations on that find ,hope you got it for the price written in the photo ,nice fine .

Floortrader… I can't remember where I got that photo…not sure who paid that price! I do have a kind of funny story… I wound up getting a 6 volume supreme global set still in boxes that someone tried to put in a garage sale once but apparently didn't sell. They stuck other garage sale stickers to keep track of their sales to one of the boxes…

Hi!
I've decided I don't collect stamps ... I collect Minkus pages and binders!
I got 99 problems and they are all Minkus!
It all began in the 1960's... with a zombie collection of duplicate pages from two versions of the comprehensive, and/or Master and not enough supplements.

Then there's the problem, a great thing happened and all the colonies became independent .... except on the stamp pages. I ... just ... can't. And I had wanted to seperate things geographically ... the horror ... the horror.

Finally bought Amos Supreme part 1 that took care of a lot of colonial problems What the hay Canada is a C country, I is for India!! Woo hoo!

It just would have been nice if Amos had taken the smallest amount of care to print the pages on a color that looked like the original off white. (Shhhh ...
So I now have to reprint pages on my large format printer - I use Domtar Cougar Natural 70#)

But yes, i'm into Minkus. Someday when I have enough posts, I hope I can assist people who might be looking odd pages.

There were some musings in this thread and a few others about how much weight would be added to Big Reds with 120,000 stamps added to the pages. Based on data provided in the forum, I calculated that the effect would be something below 25 lbs, perhaps closer to 15-20 lbs. May not sound like a lot, but the weight of a single stamp is apparently in the micrograms.

Taking the traditional format of a Penny Black (.02 m x ,024 m) you get 2083.333 stamps per m2.
Normal printing paper weighs 80 gr./m2. That would give a weight of 0.0384 gr. per stamp.

Stamp paper tends to be much lighter but not 1/38th of the weight. Also, mint stamps are gummed and most later stamps are of a larger size. So, it is more likely you are talking milligrams.

NSK - so what is your estimate for the likely rough weight of 120,000 mixed stamps?

I think I used 400 stamps per ounce on average. 120,000 stamps would thus weigh 300 ounces, or 18.75 lbs.

I wrote an article about two collectors that completed Big Blue through 1977- About 195K stamps and I estimated the stamp weight to be 24 pounds (without gum of course!) 120K stamps being 18.75 pounds makes sense. Interestingly, gum makes stamps thicker too so if you only collect ones with no gum you can pack in those pages more. What is the thickness of gum?
Pattt, That would be quite a wall of Minkus Binders! They probably have gravitational pull to them. I know a collector that is taking souvenir sheet pages from Minkus Specialized and copying them to put in his Stiener run. It goes both ways!

I wonder if it would be possible to calculate the number of stamps in album based on the weight. It would save a lot of work. Probably too many variables like interleaving, hinges vs mounts, completeness of pages. Sometimes I see ebay listings where they put the exact number of stamps (in the 5,000-10,000 range) and hard to believe somebody went through all that work to count.

A couple weeks ago, I counted up the stamps in my Big Blue--sorry I'm on the other team--volume 1 (30k spaces of which I have half filled). It took me 3 days.

I think sometimes the auction houses use collector-provided info for their estimate. They may also know an average page based on years of experience and they only count pages.

I was recently curious about the number of stamps in a collection like mine (all-different, all MNH definitives, dues, offices, some air post and some pictorials). I had the benefit of a fairly comprehensive inventory (4900+ rows in excel) where I could calculate from Scott numbers. Looks like about 38,000 right now.