"Big Blue" What The Heck Does This Mean?

Probably a naive question to many; I've used Bill Steiner's wonderful pages since I got in to WW about ten years ago after spending roughly 600 bucks on three Davos Luxe albums on my Israel collection; but is "Big Blue" an actual album/set of physical albums?

"Big Blue" - Scott international Series pages with blue binders. - colloquially known as Big Blue.

Specifically, the Scott International Album covering 1840-1940, the classical period.

John

10-4. Makes sense. In my mind (which wanders as am sure some can relate to) I thought it was an abridged version of some album(s) that just focused on easier to find stamps while omitting others like hard to find/rare/expensive stamps. Just purely an assumption and probably wrong, but what the heck!

You've basically described the Scott International. There are some tricky stamps, but generally it focused on the "easier" stamps, including sometimes just having non-designated spaces for whatever you happened to collect in a particular era for a given country.

Two things going for Big Blue: 1. The presence of existing used albums you can start with instead of spending hundreds of dollars buying new. 2. The Limaye spreadsheet listing contents to 1040.

Fairly well known, but perhaps it bears repeating -- the Scott International album, aka "Big Blue" more colloquially -- is a fairly modern creation of the 1940s and was intended as an everyman's worldwide album. So it provided spaces only for stamps most collectors would likely acquire for the period 1840-1940. It omitted all rarer stamps and the high values in most sets of stamps. This applies up to about 1940 which is now the end of Big Blue's Volume One -- ironically now available in four -- yes four -- volumes for just this one volume. A bit strange. But since nearly all stamps issued after then were "common" since they were available to anyone, after that the album half-accidentally became comprehensive from about that point on until the present.

This Big Blue in the blue binders was Scott's downsized new album to replace its former brown-colored International album (aka "Big Brown") that had existed since the late 19th century under the same name as the later Blue and which had soldiered on through the 1930s with spaces for virtually all stamps issued until that seemed no longer a good idea to try to do in one quickly growing album.

Scott's decided around 1940 to turn that massive comprehensive (all stamps issued) album into the various Scott Specialty albums we still have today, the ones which use the green binders. And that led them to replace the earlier comprehensive brown albums with the far less comprehensive blue albums under the same name of Scott International. And that album, in turn, later became grew more comprehensive as newer issues were easily acquired from the 1940s onward.

A few years ago, Mystic Stamp Shop, sensing interest by some worldwide collectors in still using the old hugely thorough Big Brown pages that were no longer available, got Scott approval somehow to sell their own identical reprinting of the earlier comprehensive pages of the old Brown album. Anyone interested in biting off more than they can chew (or brave enough) could also add the later pages from the Blue International for the period after 1940 . The result would be one massive mountain of stamp pages, and I am not that brave.

There will be a quiz on this later.

It can be a bit confusing if you are not in the USA - I am in Australia and we use Stanley Gibbons catelogues. So albums produced by Scott are not part of our personal philatelic history. In fact casting my mind around I don't think I have ever seen one except online.

I acquired a set of Scott National albums for South America at auction, and tried to use them for a while. Fairly excruciating, with what Scott calls "semi-postals" (i.e. charity stamps) separated into their own section and, worst of all, the separation of air-mail stamps, leaving stamps in the same set scores of pages apart. Binders are good though.

Thanks for the history. They also migrated to heavier weight paper at some point.

Do they still sell it? I could not find it on their website? For a company like Amos (seller of the albums), if they cannot make it profitably or in a reasonable manner, license it to someone who can. Mystic usually has most everything they produce in stock.

It is actually Subway not Mystic who sells the Vintage Reproductions,
https://subwaystamp.com/collections/vintage-pages

For a truly marvelous website based on this album and stamps covered in it, see Jim Jackson's website. http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.com/

Oops! I typed "Mystic" for some reason when I meant to type "Subway" Stamp Shop. This is what late nights can do to old brains. Apologies.

And yes, as tsmatx points out, they are called "Vintage Reproduction" pages and are still sold by Subway.

Once again, these are the old brown album page layouts Scott used in their 19th and early 20th century "International" albums, the page layouts that later became the current green Scott Specialty albums. They cover "only" 1840-1940. To cover post-1940, you'll need to buy the regular International pages (which are not quite as heavyweight as the VR pages). Subways prints the VR pages and Scott/Amos prints all the other International pages. I'm not sure why Scott/Amos agreed to let Subway do this . . .?

The VR pages are very nice -- but their comprehensiveness overwhelms me and they will require an awful lot of binders to hold them, a dozen or more. At one point they offered these same page layouts on Scott's slightly larger Specialty album paper (the green separate countries albums) punched for three-ring binders. They seem to have stopped selling those pages but continue to sell the slightly smaller International size pages as the VR pages.

Responding to Geoff Ha's frustration with the Scott Specialty albums, they follow the Scott catalogue system of separating "semi-postals" (charity stamps?) and air mails onto separate pages. As you will know, this is an American thing stemming from (silly) 19th century decisions by Scott Publishing Co. to organize their catalogue and albums this way. For unknown reasons, they decided to list these two types of stamps in separate categories with separate catalogue numbers. I honestly have no idea why they did that. They did not separate commemoratives from "regular" postage stamps so why these others? Most other catalogues do not do this.

I do understand separating non-postal stamps like revenues and newspaper stamps and some others from the others.

However, there is an easy solution! I use Scott albums almost exclusively, and those separated pages always bothered me until I had a rare moment of clarity one day which was to simply move those pages where they belong chronologically. It's not always a perfect fit since some semi and air mail pages cover more than a few years, but it mostly works. This keeps matching stamp designs and subjects together. Separating them made no sense. If you don't do this, it's "deja vu all over again" when you get to the semis and airs and see stamps with the same topic and the same stamp designs all over again.

I honestly think this was Scott's dumbest moment because it really makes no sense. Even silly souvenir sheets (which I hate) are included with the majority of stamps but semis and airs are not? Some collectors defend this practice but that just shows how getting used to something odd habituates you to its weirdness. We also still use inches and yards and quarts and don't really know what a "kilometer" is. Traveling to Europe, my brain goes into constant calculation mode translating Centigrade (or is it Celcius) to Fahrenheit and kilometers to miles -- so why not also arrange our stamp albums in strange ways, too? And we think we're the normal ones. Ha!

Yes, the air mails and semi-postals are a bad decision but my biggest gripe with Scott is scattering stamps issued for a geographical area (mostly former colonies) such that you end up having to buy most of all 6 volumes to get coverage. There are numerous early issues that comprise a few album pages that are in scattered because the listings are under a different, often earlier, listing. Who should be expected to know a stamp with an Iraq overprint is under Mesopotamia?

I believe a major reason for Scott not addressing most of these issues is that they also sell a complete line of albums. This would mean at least two (2) versions of albums since they want to support prior purchasers as we

Is there a Gibbons, Michel, or Y&T version of Scott International or Specialty albums? No one mentions them.

We discuss Steiner and I know there are other "homemade" PDF sold albums based upon listing on ebay but never get mentioned here. Some of Steiner hacks but some are not.