Statesman Album Found At Yard Sale

I came across this Statesman stamp album at a yard sale for $5.




I've currently been focusing on Canada exclusively since I started collecting again, so I thought this would be a good place to temporarily house foreign stamps that I acquire. However, it wasn't until after I brought it home that I realized it only goes as far as the L's. Oops!

I guess my new goal will be collecting stamps from countries that start with A to L, lol. Still, I've seen what albums sell for, so it seemed like a good buy. (No stamps are inside.) Maybe I'll find the other half at another garage sale! Or I can insert blank pages for the missing countries.

The STATESMAN was the Harris standard foreign album during the late 1960s and 1970s. If you really wanted to splurge there was the CITATION which was their largest foreign album. One quickly needed extra binders for the yearly supplements of the time.
Yours appears to have survived well, as the plastic covers tend to dry out and split along the seams over time.
Good luck finding the other half of the pages. In later years, Harris did sell them as a set of 2 to hold all the world.

This one has a copyright date of 1979.

I had that album in the 70s. It had a ton of space for stamps from the eastern block countries 1950-1970. I consider it a child's album.

Well, considering I'm still a relative beginner, maybe it's appropriate, lol.

You could use the album as filler pages for a larger album. Shop on ebay for the second album (M-Z).

I don't think of it as a child's album. Back in the day many adult collectors used it, or the larger Citation Album. If the pages are in good shape and you want to use it for your collection go ahead. I think the suggestion to try and find the 2nd volume on ebay is a good one. Good luck!

Something I noticed about every Citation Album I've ever seen is that stamps would get caught in the inner margins and sometimes it wasn't possible to see the full stamp. Is this true of the Statesman as well?

I think that happens with the Statesman too. The other problem was with stamps on both sides of each page, they were always catching onto the stamps on the facing pages as you turned them. All a function of trying to cram as many stamps into as little a space as possible.

So there's no question they weren't ideal. But for someone just starting out and not knowing if they really want to stick with it, I think they're fine. At a certain point you'll either decide to concentrate on just a couple countries (as I did) or look for a more serious world-wide solution like the Scott Albums.