Minkus Supreme Global Albums (The Big Red Thread)

That's awesome

Landoquakes ---- Nice link to the U-tube of Earl's collection . Looks like he sold it to a stamp auction firm . Nice group of albums ,with a group of specialty binders and a few albums for duplicates .

Sounds more like a hoarder if it took 8 years to organize by his children .

Thanks landoquakes.

Nice video

It has been a while since this topic was active. Can I have some inputs from the minkus folks here on how significant is the difference in coverage between the Amos MSG 1840-1952 reprint vs the ioriginal 3 volume MSG 1840-1966 for the years they overlap on top of Minkus numbers being added to all the pages in the 1966 edition. I seem to recollect reading that Minkus went back and fiddled with the 1966 edition.If they did, did they improve the coverage or did they made it worse ( by removing stamps to accomodate the size/number of volume constraints)?
aragorn

Happy to see this topic come back. Hard to improve on Jim's assessment of the 1840-1952 https://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.c...bum-for.html and Part 4 here (1967-1970) https://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.c...ar-1967.html I think he reviewed the 1953-1963 part but I can't seem to find it. To answer your question, I do think there are subtle differences, as there are from the two volume to the three volume Minkus that were originally offered. They are very close though. I did notice from the old 2 volume to the old 3 volume, stamp spaces are packed tighter together. Not sure if the reprints did this or not.

Thanks Landolakes. Do you have both the 2 volume amos reprint and the 3 vol 1966? If you do can you compare Timor ? There is significantly reduced coverage in the 1966 version. They even cut out a bunch of the ceres series. I worry there are going to be similar large changes in other countriies. I looked at US, Australia, Austria, Afghanistan and a few british colonies and they seemed to be all right. I will keep checking.
Aragorn

I don't have the reprints, only the originals. (the two and the three volume version.) Jim's site says that Amos used a 1957 update in their reprint. I wonder if they used the old annual supplements as the basis of the updates to 1966 or did they use the Master version, which also had an edition to 1966 at the same time. Not sure!

Landolakes that actually is something that I did not consider. Is this the post that you are talking about? https://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.c...uction.html.
I found some more changes. Coverage for early Upper Volta has decreased. My 1952 reprint has 1 row each of postage dues covering 1920 and 1928 . The entire row of 1928 postage dues is missing in my 1966 version. Moving on Syria has a lot of pages redesigned in the 1966 volume.

By the way I recently managed to get hold of a pristine 3 volume 1966 MSG with no stamps in them ( says 1966 version with 1966 supplement included) after looking for more than a year on ebay.
Aragorn

Good score on the three-volume Minkus. I really like the coverage of those pages beginning in the 1930s. I still wish they had a bit more for the classic stamps, but the pages do include the higher values of sets from the 40s to the 60s which is nice and Scott tends to leave those off.

Thank you. Many hours of enjoyment coming up for sure!
Aragorn

Does anybody have a spreadsheet for converting minkus numbers to Scott numbers? My 1966 MSG has the minkus numbers for each stamp. It would be nice to have or help make a spreadsheet for this. I would volunteer to be part of a group if people want to collaborate.
Aragorn

This has come up before and I think something was afoot to do this but I can't recall where.

Good to know. I will dig around. I think Eric66 was writing scott numbers in the stamp boxes themselves
Aragorn

Does anyone know of a source for older Minkus Supreme Global supplements? I am in search for the 1980 and 1981 supplements. I recently bought an unopenned 1981 supplement on ebay, but unfortunately when I opened it up it had severe brown water damage throughout. I got a full refund but the Seller will not open up either of his other 1980 and 1981 boxes to check for the same type of damage. His reasoning is that if I back out of agreeing to buy them he will have lost half the value of a sealed supplement. I understand that, but as long as they are useable and I had agreed to buy them, what does he lose? Anyway since he won't sell them to me, any other sources?

AMOS have stated that they do not have the pages for the early 1980s and thus, cannot print on demand. Global doesn't have any and Subway is sending me one for a subsequent year.

Amos Advantage (Scott Publishing) prints Minkus Global supplements, as you probably know, but they only have the more recent ones. To add older supplements you probably won't find an actual dealer with them in stock. Although with today's "print on demand" system, you'd think they could just print them -- "on demand," wouldn't you? You might call them and see why they can't do that. With some demand, maybe they'll rethink their approach and start doing that?

The only other possibility is to search ebay regularly and look for either leftover supplements, as you've done unsuccessfully so far, or buy a Minkus album that has those supplements -- and remove them. That's what I did to build up my very large multi-volume (40) Scott International album, combining older, but new-looking, supplements with brand new supplements.

I collect "only" to 1975 which I've found is more than enough for one lifetime. In fact, it may be too far, and now I think 1970 would have been a better cut-off date, or even 1960 before the largest part of the gigantic flood of stamps "mainly for collectors" was released many of which never saw actual postal duty. Of course, even with my 1975 cut-off date, I'm still free to ignore the 60s and early 70s if I want to -- except for staring at those blank spaces, of course!

One last thought is to print Steiner page layouts on blank Minkus album pages and use those. I've done that with a few countries in my Scott International and they look really good. I print the pages I need from the Steiner website or disk on standard computer paper, then take those pages to Fedex and copy them onto my blank pages (with the border and hole-punched, of course) one by one. Time-consuming, yes, but I get the pages I need and they look really good.

And one last thought that just occurred to me -- I've salvaged various water-damaged album pages (in my case, large Davo pages) by buying matching blank pages and photocopying the damaged pages directly onto them. The result is identical but again it will take time doing the photocopying. Or you can have matching blank paper cut in the right size by a print shop and maybe they can do the hole punching, too. Everyone needs a project, right?

Good luck finding those Minkus supps. or making your own pages.