Worldwide Collection Using A Combination Of Scott International And Steiner Pages

I don't think there is a great solution for an album for a comprehensive worldwide collection, but I'd be interested in what other comprehensive worldwide collectors do.

I now use a combination of Scott International and Steiner pages housed in 69 Scott International binders. The Steiner pages are printed on paper that matches the size of Scott International pages, but I have not bothered to try to match the borders. It's not the prettiest solution aesthetically, but it suits me.

I don't know how many people will be interested in this, but here is how I developed my set of albums.

I went through several phases to develop this collection:

Phase 1 (assembling used Scott International pages):


When I was a younger collector, I did not have much money to spend on stamp albums, so I would buy old collections on Scott International pages to try to assemble as close as I could get to comprehensive coverage cheaply. At this time, there were no Steiner pages and, at least as far as I knew, no source on International-sized pages of anything close to comprehensive coverage for pre-1940.

Phase 2 (big splurge on International pages and weird shipping accident):


Sometime in the 1990s, a stamp dealer (I won't name him) offered a deal on Scott International pages at prices that seemed too good to be true. But I scraped up the money to buy new Scott International pages from 1940 through 1992 from this dealer.

In fact, the deal was too good to be true. I don't think the dealer was trying to cheat me, but he was deeply incompetent. (I think the dealer is deceased now, but I saw somewhere that he had been banned by the American Philatelic Society before he passed away).

The pages arrived in two boxes, but one box was ripped open and contained a mix of Scott International pages (with many loose pages from packages that had torn open) and a whole bunch of vintage college football game programs.

I assume the college football programs were valuable, because the dealer agreed to refund my money for the International pages in the damaged box, if I would return the football programs to him. And I could keep the pages that remained in the box, without cost.

Financially, this turned out to be a fairly good deal. But rather than having a full set of Scott International pages from 1940-1992, I had a large number of countries in the first half of the alphabet for whom I was missing some or all of the pages for the years 1986 through 1992.

Phase 3 (purchasing Scott International supplements new through 1999):

As I got older, I could afford to spend more, so I purchased all the Scott International supplements from 1993 through 1999. These were absurdly expensive, so I thought I would stop my collection with 1999 and leave the 21st century for others.

This proved unsatisfactory, as I still had many gaps for the 1986-1992 period due to the weird accident. I'd occasionally pick up used Scott pages to fill in these gaps, but a lot of gaps remained. It also turned out that I couldn't resist accumulating 21st century stamps and I needed somewhere to keep them.

More important, the severe limitations of the pre-1940 Scott International ("Big Blue") were increasingly annoying. Way too many pages were packed with stamps in the margins that Scott had no spaces for.

This was all annoying enough that I drifted away from stamp collecting for several years and focused on my coin collection.

Phase 4 (Steiner arrives and do-it-yourself project begins):


Then I learned about Bill Steiner's pages, which are truly very close to comprehensive. This was wonderful news.

My plan was to use Steiner pages to (a) replace all pre-1940 Scott International pages, (b) fill in the random gaps in my 1986-1982 pages caused by the shipping accident, and (c) strictly on an "as needed" basis, print pages for 21st century stamps that I had acquired, with no attempt to make the 21st century pages comprehensive.

I found a local printer who was able to supply a stock of acid-free blank pages, of roughly the same weight and color as Scott International pages, cut to Scott International size and hole-punched to fit International volumes.

For about a year or so, I would print Steiner pages on 8 1/2 x 11 paper and then use my fancy office copy machine to copy the pages onto the blank International size pages. (I owned the business, so no theft from an employer was involved.)

This worked fine, but was incredibly time-consuming. So I did a lot of looking around and found another printer in the DC area who was willing to work with me. That printer agreed to print two-sided copies on acid-free International size and weight paper, hole punched to fit International volumes.

However, the printer needed a single pdf file that they could just print straight through. It probably took me a solid week or two of work, but I did manage to cut and paste Steiner files into a single large pdf file that would (a) cover all world issues through 1940, (b) fill in the 1986-1992 gaps in my collection, and (c) cover 21st century issues for a few countries I was particularly interested in, such as the US, France, Germany, and Brazil.

This cost me $2200 and I got about a thousand leftover blank pages for future use. I was planning to use these to print out 21st century pages as needed and to correct the inevitable errors that I had made in assembling my huge pdf file for the printer.

It took a long time to assemble these printed two-sided Steiner pages (about 4 banker's boxes full) into my already existing set of Scott International page, but when I was finished, I had about a 50-volume collection that was reasonably complete through 1999, with a few forays into the 21st century.

Phase 5 (now):

I thought I was done.

(a) But then I retired and lost access to my copy machine. I did a lot of research, but the only wide-format printer I could find on which I could directly print Steiner pages was the Canon Pixma IX 6820 business printer. This wasn't outrageously expensive (about $300), but it's an ink jet, very slow, and the replacement ink is outrageously expensive. However, it gives me the flexibility to print my own Steiner pages onto Scott International size paper as needed.

(b) I thought a thousand blank pages would be all the pages I would ever need, but I quickly ran out of paper. Fortunately, I went online and was able to find a supplier of pages cut and punched to fit Scott International albums at what I thought was a decent cost ($371 for 3000 pages). The vendor was Limited Papers in Newark NJ. (The paper they used was an acid-free 60-weight Cougar Natural Opaque smooth.)

(c) I finally gave up on the idea of only limited coverage for the 21st century and went ahead and bought the Scott supplements for all years from 2000 through 2023. I've incorporated these through 2022, which has brought me up to 69 volumes in Scott International binders.

(d) The Scott Supplements do not provide anything like "comprehensive" coverage for the 21st century, however. Scott is now ignoring many countries, particularly countries like Mongolia, which issue abusively large numbers of new stamp issues, mostly CTOs. In addition, for all years (20th and 21st centuries), Scott ignores virtually all souvenir sheets and many miniature sheets, as well as most perf and watermark varieties.

So now, on an as-needed basis, I am printing Steiner pages to fill in the many, many gaps in the Scott International pages. I'm getting old, so I will likely never print the thousands of pages needed to make the set anywhere near comprehensive (21st century Mongolia and Cuba pages are very low on my priority list, for example).

If anyone has made it this far, thanks for reading.

Doug

Wow, Doug! What a journey. I'm especially intrigued that you put all the Steiner files into one big PDF and then got it printed. My goodness!

I know my relatively meagre worldwide collection would look lost in 69 binders. What's it been like filling up these hard-won pages?

Oh, those pages are very far from full.

I've never counted the stamps, but I'd guess the 69 volumes have fewer than 100,000 stamps in them.

But I have vast quantities of material ready to be incorporated and now I have a place for all of them.

To clarify, I didn't put ALL the Steiner files into a pdf, only the pre-1940 files and selected files thereafter. That was a big enough task. I'd hate to think about putting all of them into a single file.

The biggest problem with the pdf was inserting blank pages at the proper places so every country and every BOB type (semi-postail, airmail, etc.) started on a new page. Since I was printing two-sided to save space, that was very tricky.

An interesting story Snopes.

I think every collector goes through a process to make their collection fit their own style.

I just finished merging 2 sets of big blues to get one that would have most of the printed pages. I saw a progression of mounting from the larger old green hinges to the thinner green hinges to the awful crystal mounts to the awful modern hinges. One collector liked mint more and the other liked used more.

"I saw a progression of mounting from the larger old green hinges to the thinner green hinges to the awful crystal mounts to the awful modern hinges."

Ha! I've gone through the same progression. It hurts me every time I have to remove an old "good hinge" and replace it with today's sorry substitutes. Why can't someone just find a way to go back to the old manufacturing specs for hinges?

Great story Doug, thank you for sharing it with us.

With the exception of Us, my entire World Wide Collection is on Steiner Pages. I now have 155 albums for assorted countries. This has worked very well for me.

Good luck on your continuing journey

Dianne

Dianne -

I am envious. If I had it to do over, I'd probably go with all Steiner pages too.

A couple of questions. (1) Did you print the pages two-sided? (2) Were there some countries that you did not print all the page for? For example, I just can't bring myself to print pages for countries that issue scads of CTOs every year, since I know I'm unlikely to ever buy any of those stamps.

Doug

Doug ---Interesting story ,you clearly had more issues than I had . I picked up a clean set of Internationals in the mid 1970's and they were my main collection until the Steiner Pages came out .

"I picked up a clean set of Internationals in the mid 1970's and they were my main collection until the Steiner Pages came out ."

Do you print your Steiner pages on the same size and color of paper as your International pages?