Minkus Supreme Global Albums (The Big Red Thread)

SIX VOLUME set for $200.00 I need to find a set ,today a new set would cost a lot more .

"Regarding using the Scott blank pages, they are not the same size as the Minkus ones. So my best bet is still to try and find a print shop that can supply a custom paper size."

No, they're not the same size. One of my examples of how you might solve your page staining problem was my recopying some Davo pages, but clearly I am not expecting you to use Davo pages unless you have Davo albums. Similarly, my examples of my using Scott pages does not assume you'll use them, either. These are just methods for doing things on any size paper you want to use. And Minkus blank (or printed) pages are available as you wish:

Various blank bordered Minkus blank pages are available on the Amos Advantage (Scott Publishing) website for you to use blank or printed-on yourself (as I do on Scott blanks):

https://www.amosadvantage.com/Store...Blank/Minkus

Or you can buy hole-punched all-blank paper from one of Bill Steiner's page suppliers at https://www.albumpages.net/ for your own use printing your own pages or just as blank pages.

Or they can print Steiner layouts for you, if you choose to use that layout, on Scott-size or Minkus-size pages or on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, all with the Steiner border.

Though I mostly print on Scott-bordered blank pages myself (so I can change the font and make other improvement), I sometimes use their Scott-size blank pages in my albums unchanged. You might find their Minkus-size blank pages useful in either of these ways. As I've said, you can fairly easily print page layouts on either these all-blank Minkus pages or on the bordered Minkus pages supplied by Amos advantage. Or, as I've said, you can have them print the Steiner layouts for you on the Minkus-size pages you need -- with the Steiner border, of course. Either way, it's not very expensive and the result is pretty good-looking, I think.

Good luck.

floortrader, $200 in 1979. Now the same set new costs about $1,838 (binders extra) Pages are much better though I have heard. At least one can still get a set, which is amazing since it was out of print for years beginning in the early 1980s.

DrewM, thanks for the link for the blank Minkus pages! Always handy for expansion and I use a few blank sheets at the start and end of every album for notes.

Minkus pages now sell for more than $1.00 a page . Album pages or blank pages ,sounds high to me .Using Steiner pages for the past 10 years [plus I have three copies of their software disk and it is on two seperate computers } my cost run 6 to 7 cents per page printed .
When I buy a bulky stamp auction lot and there are parts of albums or those now popular file folders with album pages stapled in them . I pull them apart and cut all the pages down and punch them to fit a three ring binder . Like to call that" working material " easier to work with . So cutting down more album pages than most collectors .

So it is safe to say most Minkus albums are destroyed before I even see them . Very little album sets of Minkus are intact ususelly pieces is all I see .

Nothing wrong with squeezing every last penny out of your materials budget in order to maximize the amount you spend on stamps. We're all collectors of stamps, not of stamp material. But my cost for Scott blank pages is 50c per page, not $1.00 which would be more like the cost of Lighthouse blank pages, and that starts to get pretty expensive if you're putting together a self-made album of a few hundred pages.

Add to that paper cost, the the cost of photocopying Steiner's page layouts onto these blank pages, and I figure my final self-made album pages cost me about 70c a page. For a 250 page album, that's about $175 for the pages - plus the cost of maybe two binders. Compared to album manufacturers much higher prices, that is not very expensive.

I recycle and repair old binders (being basically a cheapskate) so that adds maybe $60 for the binders. So the total for these two albums with my newly-printed "improved" pages is around $235. For an entire country, that is an amazing bargain given that Davo and Lighthouse and Lindner, and so on, will charge me $1000 or more for the same album. Scott will charge me half that, but that's still likely to be about $500 for a multi-volume album for an entire country's stamps.

Not collecting an entire country, but specializing? Then your cost will be even less as this calculation is my cost for an entire UK album or Canada or Japan or Sweden or Germany, and so on.

If someone prefers cutting down pages and hole punching them for three-ring binders as a way to cut costs even more, good for them. If that floats their boat, they should do that.
I like thrifty collectors more than rich collectors who buy everything and make nothing, so I admire that. Minkus was born on the idea of being a thriftier sort of album, but still good looking. Today, there's almost no manufacturer of stamp albums who does that anymore. Palo, Lighthouse, whoever sells stamp pages and stamp albums will charge you an arm and a leg for their albums.

But my approach is different. I lean more to the aesthetic presentation side of stamp collecting. I want all my beautiful, sometimes expensive, stamps to be mounted in beautifully good-looking stamp albums. I can't get that with file folders! And I'm not much for 8 1/2 by 11" computer pages, either, since I like to imagine myself creating really nice-looking high end albums even if they really aren't all that "high end". I certainly can't afford lots of Lighthouse or other higher-end albums, so I "do it myself" for less -- but it still does cost something. My modified and improved Steiner pages that I print myself and put into recycled and renewed Scott binders look as good as I want my collection to look -- but much less expensively than these other sellers would charge me.

There's the least expensive, the most expensive, and then there's me. I'm in the middle somewhere.

DrewM----- We all do it differently and sometimes others do it much like our own established way. All of us have our own method .

One thing that is important to me ,is what to do with duplicates . Everybody here knows I enjoy breaking down large lots that are offered at the last section of public held stamp auctions . So I value buying album sets both complete sets of Minkus or Scott's . These I use to mount stamps .Then match those albums to my main collection .

This may have been posted before but in a 2024 auction lot 2809 mentions a 17 volume Minkus run with 100,000 stamps. Too bad there weren't more videos. https://stampauctionnetwork.com/V/v796202.cfm Says it started in 1853 so, no stamps before then? You have to look quick, but it's nice to see the Bhutan Records in there.

LANDOQUAKES ---- Thanks for that link . It makes for a interesting read this morning with my coffee.

I like to explain what I see in that write up for lot 2809 and also those other worldwide collections on the same page from the stamp auction firm . It sets the mind set of the stamp describers in 2024 .

Some basics how to set a value for a huge maybe massive Worldwide Collection . This is only my viewpoint but I see how the firm prices these auction lots .

First the basic stamps on album pages sorted and mounted is 5 to 7 cents per stamp . That is common mixture type stamps .
The better stamps will be noticed and mentioned these are the $20.00 to $50.00 stamps enough of them can push the estimates higher but the collection needs a few hundred of them to push the needle higher for value . A few dozen doesn't make it . Hundreds of 20 to 50 dollar stamps are required . Remember this is where other collectors are viewing for bidding ,not those 5 cents stamps they feel those come cheap so why buy duplicates .

The last group is those stamps that catalog over $100.00 dollars ,these are the WOW factor in selling a massive collection . Again like the $20.00 to $50.00 stamps ,you need lots of them to get attention ,it the case above they get a fast notice not enough of them to get a sperate write up .

If a collection has lots of hundred dollar and up stamps. The auction firm would write up a full page to tell you what is there ,then the price shoots up to $25,000 or more ,like the recent auction lot that cataloged at $600,000 that sold for $100,000 plus .
So what makes a $100,000 collection not the 150,000 or 200,000 common stamps but the hundreds even thousands of better stamps ,yes you need those $20.00 to $50.00 stamps to build on.

The Minkus ad landoquakes has posted -- and thank you very much -- has to be the most confusingly written ad I've ever seen. Someone at Minkus who wrote that thing did not have their head screwed on right. What's wrong with it? Well, the page totals are misleading as they suggest the Master Global has more pages for more stamps than the much larger Supreme Global. It gives 5,000 pages for the former and 3,600 for the later, and while I know the dates covered may account for this, it is tremendously confusing.

So just to clear my confused head, the "Supreme" is the version of this album which has more stamps, am I right?

And, I'll add that I've never understood why Minkus sold two virtually identical albums with two different, hardly noticeable, names in virtually identical binders. For years, even eagle-eyed me did not even notice the difference as I thought they were the same album with the same pages. Who markets things this way? "Here's a car that is much better and much more expensive than this other car which is virtually identical to it in every way you can notice" was never said by anyone.

I was 14 years old when I bought my Master Global album in 1967 (which I still have) for $49.00, as I remember.
The distinction between the Supreme Global (3 volumes) and the Master Global was pretty clear. The Master Global
was an advanced intermediate album. With some exceptions it did not provide space for expensive long sets, but it accommodated most of what I had. It was short on space for BOB issues, so I used blank pages for a lot of flotsam and
jetsam. The Supreme Global supplements worked fine, though I quickly had a lot of blank pages for the newer issues, it was a bit tougher to run thins down in those days. The Supreme Global, on the other hand, was three times the size and price, and it seemed as though it had spaces for everything, though I now know that is not the case. In any event, in those days, for me and my friends, the distinction between the two was chrystal clear.

DrewM It gets harder to tell between Master and Supreme pages for part of the reason Hlewagastiz points out. The supplements were the same between the two so once you interleaved those supplements into your album it does really get hard to tell where the Master ends and the Supreme starts. The Master album came out first and then a two volume Supreme was issued along with the Master. The best way to tell them apart is to look at the first page or two for any country and the less coverage in the Master becomes apparent. For sure the ad is a little mixed up, saying 200K will fit in four binders and 125K will fit in six. In reality, the six volume Supreme was supposed to fit 240K stamps though 1976. Part of the reason why I liked lot 2809, many common stamps of course in there, but imagine how long that took! I would love to see what a 17 volume set would look like with 200K stamps in it.

One of the strengths of the Minkus Supremes is that they have spots for stamps that Scott Internationals don't. In my Scott International, there are exactly two pages for Umm al Quwain from 1968-1971. In Minkus, there are many pages including this set. Of course many collectors skip the Sand Dunes.

Thanks, landoquakes. My interest in the stamps of Umm al Quwain is fairly limited, but that's one remarkable page you have there.

But it reminds me of what I've always been bothered by about general stamp albums, especially of the Grossman and H.E. Harris variety, and similar brands. They tended to assume that average collectors were going to end up with lots of "sand dunes" and other "printed only for collectors" stamps which rarely if ever saw postal duty in the country they were issued for -- places all over Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Given that assumption, which was probably right, they put in a lot of pages for those stamps.

That's perfectly fine if you want to collect those stamps, but I don't. Yet I'm not inclined to tear out all those pages. You never know, I might come across a pile of those stamps. I ended up somehow with an album of Burundi stamps, so I reorganized it, added a few that were missing, and just generally tidied it up. So now I am officially a collector of not just Congo and a few other African countries, but also Burundi whose stamps are, to be honest, often just really silly stuff.

With serious albums, I almost wish the old Scott Publishing Co. "Black Blot" standard would apply so those pages would just be left out. Someone must collect the modern stamps of Upper Volta or Mongolia, or Burundi, but if you're paying many hundreds of dollars to buy a really nice album you treat well, it's probably not you. I prefer fewer pages for some countries and more for others. But that album isn't made, is it?

I have a Scott International (40 volumes), and because my pages only go up to 1975, I don't need to deal with this problem so much. Had I made my cutoff date earlier like 1970 or 1965 or 1960, since most of this stuff is modern, it would be even less of an issue. Of course, I can just leave all those pages empty or even remove them . . . but that kind of bothers me partly because for some reason I want the person who ends up with this massive set of albums after I'm gone to have a complete album and not curse me for throwing hundreds of pages out.

And I suppose Burundi might suddenly become a major tourist spot and who knows what might happen to Umm Al Qiwain? Actually, we do know that. Today it's been absorbed into the United Arab Emirates as one of its cities and the UAE seems to be pretty much rolling in oil loot. Maybe its even a little embarrassed now about its earliest stamps which were issued almost entirely for the amusement of beginning collectors. I kind of hope so.

But there's no hope at all for some stamp issuers like Mongolia. I actually "collect" Mongolia, and the unbelievable silliness of their stamps is one of the reasons I do that. But I put them into separate cheap albums partly because in my Scott International, my cutoff date of 1975 leaves most of them without spaces to mount them in -- and also out of sheer embarrassment that someone might actually think I collected them because I take them seriously.