Do you remember your first?

Stamp album, that is. Mine was published by Minkus and titled, appropriately enough, My First Stamp Album. My father gave me the album as part of a kit, My First Stamp Outfit. The kit included the album which had spaces for 4300 stamps, a packet of 100 all different stamps (one hopes all in the album), a plastic pocket magnifier, 1000 stamp hinges, stamp tongs, and adhesive flags and coats of arms of the world. Cost for the kit was $2.95 (1959). Although my album and kit probably disappeared before I was in high school, I remember distinctly some of the stamps that came with it, such as Scott # SD7, the 20 cent Special Delivery stamp featuring a 1920s postal truck which was decades before my time, as well as some 3 cent US commemoratives which were only a year or two old. It's interesting how some things stick with you.

Filling one volume? Try Eleven!

Thanks to Ron Mitchell via the Virtual Stamp Club, I've learned that "Stan Cornyn and Murray Geller filled all the International albums that existed at the time (eleven) over about six years in the 1970s. Their story was reported by Cynthia Gorney in the Washington Post in an article called "They Collected the World." ...[It] was reprinted in Scott's Monthly Stamp Journal, July 1978, pp. 16-17 and 20-21."

The original Washington Post citation is "They Collected the World: The Herculean Effort for a Grand Total of 195,219 Stamps. In a Herculean Effort, They Collected the World." By Cynthia Gorney, Special to The Washington Post. Apr 26, 1978, B1-[B2?] (in the "STYLE Entertainment People Comics" section).

The collection was sold by Collectors Auction Service in four sales under the title "Cornyn - Geller All - World Collection": Part One, Countries A-F : March 1, 1978 ; Part Two, Countries G-M : August 1, 1978 ; Part Three, Countries M-R : November 1, 1978; and Part Four, Countries S-Z : March 15, 1979.

I've requested a copy of the Scott's Monthly reprint from the APS Library as well as the auction catalogs and will post more information later. If anyone knows of others who have completed a volume 1 (or more), please let me know.

Scott International Volume I Coverage

Several years ago I came across the citation to an item in the American Philatelic Society's library titled "Study of omissions made in the last revision of Scott's International Postage Stamp Album. Part 1 1840-1940" by Arthur J. Palmer, Jr. I finally got around to borrowing a copy and it is a very interesting document.

What Mr. Palmer did was to give the APS a copy of his 1982 study which "systematically reviewed the 1840-1940 volume and identified what has been left out which would frustrate the average collector." His purpose was to bring the omissions to the attention of the Scott Publishing Company in the hopes that they would address the issues in the next revision of the volume. In 1988, Scott Publishing indicated to him that the then "Part 1-A and Part 1-B" [were to be] extensively re-edited when they have completed reprinting the Specialty Series that was ignored for so many years before sale of the company to Amos Press..."

Mr. Palmer indicated that the "lack of provision of very common issues...[was] mainly the result of the last revision when an attempt was made to provide for the matching of pages with Part II." Cognizant that Scott could not economically be expected to make wholesale revisions, his suggested corrections tried to minimize "re-editing of existing pages."

His minimum recommendation would require 39 new pages, 12 of which would replace blank pages in the album. This would restore 75% of the missing issues. To achieve 89% coverage would require an additional 15 additional pages. One hundred percent coverage would require 40 additional pages.

Mr. Palmer developed a precise and objective set of rules for determining which stamps would belong, the gist of which was to identify missing low value stamps rather than make decisions based on popularity, aesthetics, or similar subjective criteria.

One interesting part of Mr. Palmer's report is his opinions on what had happened in the revision that I assume occurred in the 1970s. He believed that in order to provide continuity between volume 1 and volume 2 that the editors "left out much material," with "back of the book" material, regional and occupation issues, and even regular/commemorative stamps of the 1930s bearing the brunt--i.e., pre-1930 regular and commemorative issues remained largely untouched. Also, he felt that the Scott catalog then current was more fragmented than it is now, particularly regarding definitive issues that were frequently reissued in different colors and denominations...sometimes covering two or more decades." This results in issues that appear together in recent versions of the catalog but are split over multiple pages in the International. Finally, he noted that there were problems with inaccuracies, some of which were natural consequences of changes in the underlying Scott catalog. Others could have been avoided such as correct use of terms like "overprinted" and "surcharged." Finally, he noted that chronological order tends to suffer more in the later editions.

One comment he made I wish I better understood: If Scott were to follow his suggestions, "the added pages will cover a very high percentage of the material that was left out from the last major revision in the 1950's." My 1969 version has copyright dates of 1955, 1965 and 1969 but I currently have no way of determining what changed with each of these revisions except that the countries below identified as left out of the last revision are still in the 1969 edition, albeit out of strict alphabetical order. So, again, I think he is talking about a revision that occurred in the seventies.

The majority of Mr. Palmer's's study is concerned with identifying specific stamps to put into the new version. Here is a summary of the largest lacuna (there are many less numerous omissions not included below):

Argentina--missing 207 official stamps for departments
Austria--missing 30 WW I Military stamps
Benin--entire country left out at last revision
China--missing 88 stamps from Sechwan and other provinces
Cilicia--entire country missing (I assume that Cilicia and similarly designated countries below were never in any Scott International "Blue" edition although they are listed in Scott's catalog)
Cochin China--entire country left out at last revision
Corfu--entire country left out at last revision
Czechoslovakia--many regular issues missing; no newspaper or special delivery stamps; "poor coverage of Bohemia, Morvia, and Slovakia"
Dalmatia--entire country missing
Eastern Rumelia--entire country missing
Eastern Silesia--entire country missing
France--missing 24+ Offices in China - Kwangchowan
Hungary--missing 73 Occupation stamps
India--Mr. Parker would like to see "real" spaces for Convention and Feudatory states (several hundred stamps)
Iraq--missing 49 official stamps 1923-
Moheli--entire country left out at last revision
Obock--entire country left out at last revision
Paraguay--missing 44 regular issues between 1910 and 1938
Persia--missing 67 regular issues 1917-
Philippines--missing 24 official stamp
Poland--missing many common values
Rio de Oro--entire country left out at last revision
Romania--"substantial number of color changes and values missing for the regular issues"; 50 missing postage due and official stamps
Russia--43 stamps from offices in the Turkish empire
South Russia--entire country missing
Tobago--entire country left out at last revision
Turkey--missing 92 regular issues; 39 newspaper stamps

How many stamps do you have?

Seems like a perfectly reasonable question but a pain both to begin and keep current. I started with a quick and dirty count on the Scott International Volume 1 I purchased, but am now going back through and doing a more thorough job. I'm using an Excel spreadsheet keyed to country and page. (Pages in the Scott International aren't numbered--I've added numbers in pencil.) Once done I will copy and paste to as many columns as will fit on a page and then print the inventory. As I add new stamps, I will pencil these in on the printout. Then I will periodically update the spreadsheet and print out a new copy. At least that's the plan.

Addendum: I've completed the spreadsheet. I decided it would be easier to print if I copied the data from Excel and pasted it into Microsoft Word using a 3 column format. With margins at .75 inches and using Arial 9 point as the font, I was able to fit everything into 8 pages. In order to get each page count from the album to fit on one line, I truncated the listings to 25 spaces [=left(A1,25]. The resultant entries after pasting into MS Word look something like this:

343/345 Egypt 25
344/346 Egypt 30
345/347 Egypt 30
346/348 Egypt 18
347/349 Egypt 22
348/350 Egypt 9
349/351 Eritrea 2
350/352 Eritrea 0

The first column is the page number. Why the slash? Because I can't count. In retrospect, I should have done a more methodical numbering of pages. While I only made 3 mistakes, the worst was to misread my handwriting and skip 40 pages about one third of the way through! So in the example above, the 343 indicates my penciled in page number; the 345 is what the actual page number should be. Next is the country followed by the number of stamps mounted on that page (counting only those stamps matching the illustrations or that can legitimately be placed in one of the blank spaces). In my Excel spreadsheet I have an additional column for the actual number of spaces on the page, but I haven't done any count of these yet.

If anyone would like a copy of the Excel spreadsheet to use for your own collection, just let me know. Again, I have the 1969 edition although I'm not yet clear on what difference the copyright date makes.

What to put in all those blank spaces

What actually belongs in a Scott International or Minkus Global is not as easy as it seems and in the end comes down to personal choice--after all, this is supposed to be fun :) Obviously, the stamps that correspond to the image or catalog number form the core of the collection although even here there may be multiple options due to color, perforation, etc. But there are also numerous blank spaces for, as Scott terms it, "such rare stamps as may be acquired." The most liberal view would be that as long as stamps are from the appropriate country and within the chronological range, they are legitimate candidates for empty spaces. I prefer a more conservative approach: stamps in blank spaces should be non-depicted issues from the same set or a set with the same design type (but that might have a different perforation, watermark, overprint, etc.).

Some collectors will put closely related stamps underneath one another in the same space--for example, same design but different color. I'm not certain what I think about this although I don't mind putting one or two duplicates underneath so that I can quickly find these for trading.

The final mounting decision is whether to "color outside the lines"--i.e., mount non-depicted stamps anywhere on the page. I'm also conflicted about this as there are undepicted stamps that I hate not to include. But, at some point, I suspect that the look of the page will suffer, not to mention the weight the extra stamps add and increasing the possibility of stamps on adjacent pages catching on one another if you don't use interleaving. An alternative would be use any blank pages for the country if available or to add blank pages although this would separate issues chronologically from their depicted counterpoints.

Minkus and other album options

The main competitor to the Scott Company after World War II was Jacques Minkus who the New York Times credited with giving "the once-patrician hobby of stamp collecting its mass-market reach." Minkus was associated with the famous New York Department store Gimbels for years. In 1951, he first published the Minkus Global stamp album edited by Colonel George Tlamsa. The 1,250 page first edition sold for $15 with binder and claimed to contain "more than one-half of all the major stamp varieties ever issued" with spaces for 55,951 stamps and 24,000 illustrations. Supplements were available from 1952 on. In 1959, it cost $18.95. By 1966, the base volume had grown to 1680 pages with spaces for 65,000 stamps.

I believe in 1954 Minkus first published the even larger Supreme Global stamp album. Originally in two volumes, the 1954 edition contained spaces for over 76,000 stamps with 40,000 clear illustrations, and 2000 pages. I don't have the stats for Volume 1, but in 1955, the 1008 page Volume 2 covered Italy to Zanzibar with spaces for 38,452 stamps and 20,390 illustrations. In 1959, it cost $27.50. In 1961 the Supreme Global was still two volumes, but Japan started Volume 2.

By 1966 the Supreme Global album had expanded to 3 volumes with 3600 pages, 96,000 illustrations and spaces for 120,000 stamps--"more than two-thirds of all stamps ever issued." I believe the Supreme Global originally had its own supplements but at some point began using the same supplements as the Master Global.

Minkus sold his company in 1986 to Harry de Jong (and was owned after that by Novus Debut?). The Minkus line is now distributed by Amos Publications which continues to issue new supplements. Currently you cannot purchase new copies of many of albums, although the Master Global is usually available on eBay or from dealers/auction houses, albeit less frequently than the "Blue" Internationals. Complete Supreme Globals are much harder to find.

At some point I would like to make comparisons in coverage of the Scott Blues versus the two flavors of Minkus. It would also be interesting to know if it is easily possible to distinguish between the Global and Supreme Minkus album pages. On eBay, at least, some albums with the Supreme Global binder are obviously the Master Global pages and perhaps on occasion vice-versa. Of course, after awhile, the supplements did double duty so the differentiation would apply only to the base volumes I assume (but at what cutoff date?). My current guess is that the Supreme Globals are the ones with Minkus catalog numbers for 19th century issues. Can anyone confirm?

No other worldwide albums that I am aware of offer the coverage of the Scott International and the Minkus Master Global albums. (I'm ignoring that one could try to purchase all of the Scott "Green" Specialty albums for extreme coverage, although I don't know if even in their heyday the series covered every country. Minkus had their own equivalent of country and regional albums.) Scott used to publish a one volume Grand Award album. It had the virtue of including Scott catalog numbers. I don't know how the Grand Award compared in coverage to what I assume was its main competitor, the Minkus Master Global. H. E. Harris published several larger worldwide albums. Although they have their proponents, my impression is that many common stamps were omitted for even popular countries, at least for earlier issues.

The remaining album option is to use computer printable pages such as those offered by Stamp Albums Web (http://www.stampalbums.com/). The site offers a "complete set" of over 6500 Classic Era pages. This includes British Commonwealth to the start of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and all other countries to the end of 1940. as well as 50,000 U.S. And foreign pages that you can mix and match. Some (all of the Classic era?) are available in the form of Adobe Pagemaker files that can be modified for personal use.

UPDATE 6/10: I just saw on eBay an auction for "MINKUS SUPREME GLOBAL STAMP ALBUM VOL 5 New 1971-1973." Sure enough, the title page actually says "Supreme Global" and Volume 5. It doesn't give the number of stamps but the number of pages is 1328. If there was an "official" Volume 4, I guess it covered 1967-1970. I've seen a combined Supreme/Master Global supplement for 1976 so presumably it was sometime between 1973 and 1976 that Minkus started combining the supplement for both versions.

Scott Internationals

[I've updated some of the information below since this was published. I suggest using the Blog search function in the upper left hand corner to find relevant posts.]

To the person seriously interested in collecting worldwide, there are really only four possible choices for housing your collection: the Scott International "Brown" series, the Scott International "Blue" series, the Minkus Master or Supreme Global series, or computer produced album pages. (I'm going to ignore stockbooks, blank pages, etc. although these are viable options for some people.) A big problem with any of the first three approaches is that the albums go in and out-of-print. Often, only more recent supplements are available (this is especially true for Minkus).

I've gathered the following from personal knowledge as well as a variety of sources on the Internet. Also very helpful was Michael Laurence's Editor's Choice column entitled "Classic Scott album pages reproduced" which appeared in the 31 October 1994 issue of Linn's Stamp News, page 3. Nevertheless, there are many gaps and no doubt errors. If you can add or correct, please let me know.

The most comprehensive albums ever published were the Scott International "Brown" albums, so called because of the color of their covers. The Scott International series began in the 1800s, and featured spaces for all Scott listed issues ("spaces for all varieties of watermarks, inverted pictures, etc., etc."; but not all perforation varieties) during the years covered.

I don't know whether it applied throughout the history of the "Brown" albums, but at least at one point, you had your choice of a variety of versions: bound printed on both sides of the paper; bound printed on one side of heavy paper, a special bound edition on even heavier paper; and, finally, unbound with "movable leaves."

I believe Scott stopped publishing the "Brown" albums after 1938, preferring to concentrate on their specialty series in "Green" albums for individual countries and regions. Even so, the original volumes show up on eBay or in auctions with some frequency.

Some years ago the company Vintage Reproductions of Notre Dame, Indiana, reprinted, with Scott's permission, the "Big Brown" albums on one side of 70-pound acid-free 10" x 11.5" paper, one country per page. The pages were cut and drilled to fit the "Blue" International Binders making it easy to continue with subsequent volumes of the "Blue" International Series (qv). In 1971, Subway Stamp Company bought out Vintage Reproductions and sells new copies on two different sizes of paper: one matches the original International paper size and the other the size of paper used in Scott's Speciality albums. I don't know whether Vintage originally sold their albums on two different paper sizes or not.

Volume 1 as published by Vintage covers 1840-1900 (815 pages); volume 2 covers 1901-1919 (1159 pages), volume 3 covers 1920-1929 (1058 pages), volume 4, 1930-1934 (799 pages), and volume 5, 1935-1938 (709 pages). Volume 6 covers 1939-1940 (612 pages). I believe Vintage Reproductions itself, not Scott, created the final volume so collectors could expand the set with the "Blue" Internationals if they desired.

(In the original Browns as published by Scott, the company differentiated between the 19th Century Edition and the 20th century volumes, which they numbered as Volume 1 (1901-1919), volume 2(1920-1929), volume 3 (1930-1934), and volume 4 (1934-1939), the last edition of the final volume corresponding to the 1942 Scott Catalog.)

As one might expect, the "Brown" albums contain many very expensive and elusive stamps. (Michael Lawrence's article notes that the first page for British Guiana alone would cost literally millions of dollars to complete.) Interestingly, this comprehensiveness appeals to many collectors of classic issues who rightly note that the much less complete International "Blue "albums or Minkus titles omit many stamps that a collector might reasonably expect to own. I, on the other hand, am vexed by seas of empty spaces that can never be filled, a difficulty that is mitigated by another series that began life as the Junior Internationals.


I don't know exactly when, but no later than 1917 and into the 1940s, Scott published a Junior Edition which eschewed comprehensiveness in favor of offering a representative collection of the postage stamps of the world. The Junior Edition forms the basis of the "Blue" Internationals that are still being updated with annual supplements by Amos Publishing who purchased Scott Publishing in 1984. Most Junior editions were hardbound. The nickname for the new series comes from the Blue binding that was used for the last releases in the Junior line and carried over even after "Junior" was dropped from the name. I don't know precisely when that occurred but I have seen on eBay a 1941 Scott Junior and, on the other end, a 1947 Scott International without Junior in the title.

The "Blue" International volume 1 covers 1840-1940. It is printed on two sides of a page. Volume 1 was originally issued in a single album, and then, presumably to keep the cost down, was divided and sold in two parts: 1A and 1B. My original understanding was that the bifurcated version was identical in layout to the one part. But an analysis of the Scott International volume 1 by Arthur J. Palmer that is in the American Philatelic Society Library implies that the two part version "provided for the matching of pages with Part II." Today, the album is sold in 4 parts (1A-D); when in print, that is. According to several sources, this version definitely starts all countries on a new page, making it easy to keep countries together when interfiling supplements (although I don't know what happens with airmails and back of the book materials).

While I'm going to talk about the Palmer study in another post, it is worth noting here that in originally splitting volume 1 into two parts, Scott apparently deleted a number of stamps that were in the single part version. According to Palmer, in 1988 Scott was planning a major re-editing of volume 1. Perhaps this was what was accomplished with the 4 part version. If anyone reading this owns the 4 parter, I would love to hear from you.

I own a copy of the 1969 edition which has copyright dates of 1955, 1965, and 1969. My copy has 1322 pages (including blank recto pages and one repeated page). It would be interesting to know what changed in these three years from previous versions although at least the 1955 copyright may be related to changes in numbering in the US section of the Scott catalog--just a guess. (The 1955 edition still used the 1943 catalog for the US section!) Interestingly, the 1969 version still contains countries that begin on the reverse side of the page. So presumably the change to integrate with Volume II came between 1969 and the date of Palmer's initial study, 1980.

I have heard that the reason the 4 part version of volume 1 is out of print is because Scott no longer has the masters (one rumor is that they were destroyed in a fire).

The current breakdown of the Scott International series for the coverage period I'm interested in is as follows:

#1A1 1840-1940 US; Aden-Ethiopia (the latest version of Volume 1 has 48,000? spaces; ? Illustrations; 1943 edition had 1200 pages with 35,000 spaces and 8,000 illustrations; the 1955 edition also had 35,000 spaces, 8000 illustrations and still references the 1943 Scott catalog; my 1969 edition has 1322 pages)
#1A2 1840-1940 Falklands- Latvia
#1B1 1840-1940 Lebanon through Quelimane
#1B2 1840-1940 Reunion-Zululand
#2A 1940-1949 USA-Jamaica (total 1280 pages, 16,000 spaces, 6,000 illustrations both parts)
#2B 1940-1949 Japan through Zanzibar
#3A 1949-1955 USA-Jug (15,000 spaces --both parts)
#3B 1949-1955 Kenya through Zanzibar
#4A 1956-1959 USA; Aden-Kenya (15,000 spaces --both parts)
#4B 1956-1959 Korea-Zanzibar
#5 1960-1962 Afghanistan through Zanzibar plus United States for the years 1960-1963
#5A 1963-1965 (part year) Abu Dhabi through Zanzibar plus United States for the years 1963-1965

In all cases, the binders are sold separately. (According to the publisher, the regular 3" binder holds 300 pages; the jumbo 4", 400 pages.)

Unfortunately, currently you cannot purchase new copies of many of the early volumes, although they are regularly available on eBay or dealers/auction houses.