The famous stamp collector Josiah Lilly said that there were 100,000 postage stamps he wanted for his collection and he succeeded in acquiring 77,000. My considerably easier target is 35,000 of the more common stamps from 1840-1940 contained in the Scott Blue International Album Volume 1. This blog will record my progress, provide general information about Classic era philately and hopefully encourage other "Blue" collectors.
6 comments:
Very nice. I just got an original Scott 19th Century album though from eBay. Binding is in poor shape but I will either have it three hole punched at a print shop and put it in a couple of Scott Specialty binders or if the cost is reasonable have the binding rebuilt since there are a couple of bookbinding operations in the city that appear to have the skill based on their web sites.
Now if Subway was offering the three hole version of the sheets I might have to give up on the legacy albums???
Of course, I am not really sure that I "need" the expanded albums since I am only at 26% on the Big Blue 1840-1940. :)
Thanks for passing this along! Even though I'm continually tempted to move to the Browns, it's good to know about the sale on accessories.
Joe
I purchased the whole set of 3-hole punched Vintage "brown" pages a couple of years ago, but they never quite felt "comfortable" to me, and I ended up just going back to Scott International 1840-1940 (Big Blue). I did pull out all the airmail pages and put them into separate binders as I wanted to collect airmail in more depth, but everything else is back in their Big Blue home.
I think it is the feeling of having an obtainable goal of filling the Big Blue - which is at least possible within my lifetime - which I don't have with the browns.
ChrisW, I bought the 1840-1900 volume of the Vintage pages for a good price on eBay to give it a test drive. I liked the quality, but same as you, they didn't feel comfortable. To each their own.
I'm also weighing the pros and cons of adding the Vintage Reproductions part 1 (1840-1900) pages to my existing Big Blue volumes - in place of the current pages for those years, of course.
The regular pages are very incomplete in places, often with very little good reason to have stamps omitted, so it is appealing to add the more comprehensive pages at least up to 1900. I wonder how many stamps, or what percentage of them, that appear only on the VR pages -- the additional stamps missing from Big Blue -- are obtainable vs. unobtainable? That requires knowing their catalogue values, of course. If adding VR pages adds mostly spaces I'd never be able to fill, it's probably not a good idea. But, if I could fill maybe half of the new spaces, that wold be fine with me. Not sure how to know that without going through the whole process of buying pages, mounting stamps for years, and then deciding, though.
It's also worth remembering that adding the additional pages (printed on one side, etc) means adding a few more binders to hold them, so that spreads the whole collection out a little more.
Plus the cut-off of 1900 is not precise in the Big Blue. I mean 1901 doesn't being on a separate page for every country. So you will have some overlap of stamps from the end of the 1840-1900 VR pages to the 1901 Big Blue pages and perhaps a lot with many countries having duplicate spaces. Not a big deal, but worth noting if you're a "neat freak".
And since I've organized my album alphabetically, replacing the pages would be quite a few hours of work, though only a one-time job, of course.
Hard to decide. I sure wish the designers of the Scott International had included more stamps. I don't mind empty spaces where the expensive stamps would go. I just don't want to have page after page of stamps I'll never own. An alternative is to just add blank pages to most countries, but that doesn't quite look right to me. I guess I'm addicted to "filling spaces". Who knew?
Drew-
I’m thinking that one could fill about half of the spaces for 1840-1900 in the VR without too much trouble. Some of the countries most of the spaces, others, not so much. ;-)
Post a Comment