Another Post On Self Made Stamp Album

Hello everyone.

I am sorting big boxes of stamps (I mean kilos of stamps put in bulk on various plastic boxes, no order, worldwide mess, any condition from torn badly used to pristine mint).

I would like to know your opinions (pro and con) for my little organisation

For now, I use all my spare stockbooks (not enough of them) and think it's time to shift to « classical » albums. The goal is to have a nice looking collection.

In Europe (France for me), we don't use 3 rings binders, the norm is 4 rings (2 rings are for huge office binders, they are not what I consider aesthetic enough). I consider this kind :



It's a springback binders, so no need for holes. This one come with a slipcase which is important in my opinion. It can hold something like 150 pages (80 gsm in A4 size) which I think would become rougthly 60/70 pages with stamps. It's of archival quality. As they come from UK, I have to make an order of at leat 10, so £250 which I think is quite cheap)

Concerning paper, the same brand sell acid free archival paper with a crease near the margin so the paper lay flay when you open the binder but it's quite expensive (£6 for 50 pages, A4 size, 80 gsm, ivory color).

So I consider the special Clairefontaine brand (archival paper too : iso 9706, ivory too but much heavier — 120 gsm) 13 € for 250 pages but no crease.

For the pages I think of Steiner pages, and to make mine using the AlbumEasy software for what is lacking, using the same layout for consistency.

And last : hinges for used stamps (leuchttrum Fasto hinges, Denyson were never available here) and clear mounts, certainly Leuchttrum too for mint (i am mainly a used stamp collector but sometimes, MNH happens )

Thanks for taking the time to read me and for your opinion.

I may add that the goals, as stated before are consistency ans aesthetic but also no to have more value on albums than on stamps.

Hence the choice of hinges and self printed pages. I considered the Leuchttrum Grande binders, but they are luxury items for someone like me who will need tens of binders.

Bonjour, Silhat. A few personal thoughts.

Steiner: I strongly dislike these, for various reasons. The page design is unattractive, with no thought given to attractive lay-out. A4 gives a cramped feeling. The pages are based on the Scott catalogue, which isn't used in Europe. This leads to two main drawbacks: charity stamps (known to Scott as "semi-postals", for some reason) are separated from the other commemorative issues; and air-mail stamps are also placed at the back of the book, meaning that stamps from the same set can be hundreds of pages apart (this may matter less in France, where Yvert also uses this system).

Springbacks: I use quite a lot of these, probably because I grew up with them. They make a nice display with quadrille leaves. Their main drawbacks are capacity and the difficulty of having the album lie reasonably flat when open. Really, only expensive, linen-hinged leaves, which are no longer widely sold, will address this problem. In addition, most springbacks designed for stamps (rather than the A4 design you show) don't come with slipcases. In practical terms, peg or ring albums will work better.

Bonne chance!

Consider how specialised your collection will be. If you are sorting 25 kg of on-paper Machins and looking at a Deegam Handbook, Steiner will not be in the same universe as your collection.

Also, keep in mind that Scott numbers are not used much in Europe. Pages based on Scott numbers may not be very helpful if you catalogue your items according to Yvert. Even Scott and SG do not use the same language. When one identifies purple and lilac stamps and the other calls everything purple, you might have spaces without stamps and stamps without spaces. Which leaves you a lot to correct when you might as well have started from the Yvert perspective.

Thanks for your advices.

You got a point concerning the order of stamps in Steiner pages. I didnt thougth about it. I am not using a specific catalog so I usually sort by year of issue and set.

NSK : I have the 25 kilos of Machin on paper, for them I was thinking of making my own pages using AlbumEasy. The Steiner pages are for those stamps in plastic boxes. It's a wolrdwide mess with no special things. I was thinking that Steiner's would make me gain some precious time.

GeoffHa, you have a solid point too on the aesthetic. The problem is that my own aesthetic sense in quite dull… And I am well aware that I am not in capacities of doing something more appealing.

Steiner offer something I am looking after : consistency. I like the idea of a collection where everything is on the same kind of binders, same,kind of paper with the same layout. Concerning this point my choice is not firm… Perhaps I should follow your opinion and make my own layout.

For the binder, I dislike very much ring binder : those for philatelist are too expensive, those for general purpose are mostly ugly and you can't have enough of them (once again : consistency). Here again I may change my opinion and go for Leuchttrum Grande binders.

Thanks again for your good advices

I'm intrigued about your choice of a springback album. I love how they look.

I bought an old springback, with leaves, at a club auction a few weeks back an I'm excited to use it for a project, once I think of a good project.

I'm curious about the paper you will use, however. Will it be wide enough to hold securely in the springback binder?

With A4 paper, I'd be concerned that the binder requires too much of the paper to hold it properly, leaving a very narrow region for your stamps. A4 is 210mm wide, say you clamp 25mm (which may not be enough), then leave a 20mm around the paper you can see, that leaves 165mm of 'mountable' width.


It's also totally possible that I misunderstand the paper you're planning to purchase.

PS - the leaves in my old binder are the linen hinged type. The linen hinge (that is clamped in the springback mechanism) is over 40mm wide, and the exposed paper is 200mm wide, with 170mm of quadrilled area for mounting stamps.

I use Spring back albums and am satisfied with them. The paper I use is made specially for spring back albums the sheets, also called leaves, are25cm wide by 28cm high (about10" by 11.25") The sheet has a 5.7cm margin on the left or Spine edge and 2.6cm on the right hand edge with a quadrille or graph paper pattern in the area for stamps. The ones I use have no special creases, they are specially printed for Corbitts stamp shop in Newcastle, and while not cheap they are a lot cheaper than the Stanley Gibbons pages. they appear to be of good quality, I have been using them for nearly 20 years. My write ups are handwritten. I suspect the pages are too big to fit most computer printers I have 16 springback albums in use and a stash of unused ones. I find they are very widely available used from Stamp auctions. As yet I have not bought a single springback binder new from a shop. Some of the binders I have bought had leaves in them and certainly from what I have seen the linen hinged pages are very nice. I use Showgard mounts but they have stopped making them.

You are quite right. That's the main problem with self-printed pages : 210 mm isn't large enough, even with normal ring binders.

Searching the web, I saw that with those binders you need a 35 mm left margin. If the right margin is 15 mm the usable width would be 160 mm. Let say 150 mm really usable for stamps.

That means rows of 3 to 5 stamps at most to avoid a cramped look. Sometime less, rarely more. It's quite few, but with this paper size, there's not much more one can do.

In my opinion, it's essentially a cost/efficiency choice. With A4, you will have more or less 15 to 20 stamps per page, so about a thousand stamps per binders. That means 35 € for a 1000 stamps binder, including paper and a slipcase with « professional » look.

A Leuchttrum Grande, for rougthly the same capacity (perhaps a little bit more) would be 50 €, without the paper.

It's certainly not cheap but it can't be only a cost problem. You have to consider the look, the pleasure to use beautiful medium for your collection… It's a hard choice as once it's made you can hardly change.

Thanks for your opinion. It helps a lot

Noocassel, thanks for your opinion.

Linen hinge pages would be a good thing as it would allow a flat presentation.

Your description tell me that it's not compatible with self printed pages. I began to imagine printing on A4, then past a linen hinge tape… then I realised that I was completely insane . I am completely clumsy with that kind of things : I saw myself surounded by torned sheets of paper glued together with twisted linen tape.

Too bad, it would have been nice.

I was quite optimistic : looking at Steiner's sample, it seems to be 10 to 15 stamps per page so an average of 700 stamps per binder of 60 pages.

Can someone confirm those numbers please ?

Classic stamps had more uniform sizes around the world. Modern stamps come in many sizes, including oversized. The answer to your question depends on your focus. But you appear to correct that it will be closer to 10-15 than 15-20.

You're on the right track with your collection setup! Steiner's around 10-15 stamps per page I would say, even if they're not all the same size. Trying to look nice but fit A LOT in is tough, but consistency will definitely pay off in the long run.

I'm going to London next month. I will buy just one of those springback binders and test it back at home in France. It's more secure than ordering 10 of them to finally see that they are not what I want.

If it's relevant here, I would give my opinion, with photos of my test, certainly at the begining of next year.

If that doesn't fit, I will certainly go after the Leuchttrum grande serie, they are costier but quite good looking. I love that they came with a slipcase. They are 4 rings binders and easy to get.

NSK is correct in pointing out the depth of specialisation that you want to follow. I used to make my own pages but with time constraints as well as impatience, I now use Steiner pages and 4-ring binders for my collections. As GeoffHA mentions, the Steiner layout is sometimes extremely frustrating especially when a set is split between normal postage, semi-postal and air mail. That being said, and depending on the depth of specialisation, I have an additional album in which I keep varieties with hand written annotations. In this way I can add and change pages with minimal disturbance to the main collection.

Your advices are very welcome. I tend to thinks a lot about details as I know that once I make a choice and do some albums, changing would be hard.

I know Steiner's pages are a time saving thing. It's a phenomenal work mainly useful for the american market and Scott's catalog users.

I would not be too disturbed by the classification as I have no specific worldwide catalog. Even if it was the case, I would not sort by catalog number, but, the spliting of sets annoys me a lot.

Anyway, there's no perfect solution and loosing hours just making pages is certainly discouraging.

I am not fond of handwriting on pages, my handwriting is hugly and I think it would break the aesthetic.

That the reasons I would certainly go with your approach. Steiner for the main parts and AlbumEasy with a Steiner layout for special things.

Blank Paper: £6 (less than U.S. $8.00) for 50 pages – is $0.16 per page. That seems very inexpensive to me. I regularly pay $0.60 per blank Scott page ($12 for 50 pages). And $1.00 for blank Lighthouse pages ($40-50 for 50 pages). These blank pages with the crease – which is very useful in a springback binder -- seem very inexpensive to me. Your Clairefontaine brand at 13 € (about U.S. $14) for 250 pages "but no crease" is less than $0.06 a page! That's unbelievably cheap for good album paper. I'd pay $0.16 just to get the paper with the crease in it – and still be very happy at how inexpensive it was.

Springback: As for your springback binder choice, it will work well, I'm sure, but let me give you my honest opinion about "springback" binders. I like them, they look good, and they're old-fashioned looking in a good way like older classic stamp collections. President Roosevelt used springback binders for his stamp collection! But they don't always hold the pages very well. If you drop a springback album, all the pages will come out. If you merely bump it against your desk, the pages will become uneven and you'll have to readjust them. These are not problems in any other binder. So be very careful.

A4 Paper: Don't use A4 paper in a springback binder as this leaves not enough width on the page. To me it would look silly. A4 paper in ring binders also looks too narrow to me. I need more room to spread out my stamps. I prefer Scott and Lighthouse pages (or others) which are wider. There are some good blank pages available from these companies as well as from Dauwalder's Stamp Shop in the UK (see their website) and from Marini in Italy which sells beautiful blank and quadrille pages which I buy in large amounts. About $0.25 a page which seems cheap to me -- PLUS shipping, of course.

Flat Pages? In a springback binder, the pages will not lay very flat, but that doesn't bother me much because I use 2-post binders (mostly the old-fashioned 2-post Scott binders but also some 2-post Lighthouse binders which are very elegant). In those, the pages don't lay completely flat either. For "completely flat" pages, you need ring binders, and I don't like most ring binders which look either too "industrial" or too "schoolboy" for my taste. I mostly buy my binders used (but in good condition), so I pay only about half the new price. I pay $25-40 a binder. Not cheap but not too bad. New LH binders are about $100 each. New Scott binders are about $50. Too much. Ebay is your friend for this. I make small repairs if needed. As long as they hold the pages well, a scratch or two does not bother me at all.

Steiner Pages: Unlike "some people," I do like Steiner pages a lot. It's true they're not nearly as elegant as some page layouts (Lighthouse and Scott included) but they're perfectly good-looking if not always as neatly balanced as I'd like. Stamps on Steiner pages have names so you know what the stamp was issued for – unlike most other album pages, a feature I very much like. Even Scott began to label its stamps a few years ago after decades of not doing that. The more formal albums from Lindner, Davo, Lighthouse still leave you guessing what that stamp was issued for. And often the stamp itself doesn't help much! Are we all supposed to just know what each stamp or set of stamps was issued for, who each person or image is? I collect many different countries, and I don't always know. So I give Steiner credit for this. You can also edit his pages by saving them as a Word document, as I often do, and deleting things. I sometimes delete his page borders (which are boring) and print the borderless page layout onto blank Scott or Lighthouse album pages. The resulting look is very elegant with or without a border. I've done a number of country albums this way.

Semis and Airs: As for the problem of Semi-postals (and air mails) being on separate pages in U.S. catalogues and albums, I also think that approach is very silly, a bad mistake made at the beginning of stamp collecting in the late 19th century by catalogue publishers like J. Walter Scott. My solution is simple. I put semi and air mail pages in their proper chronological location in my albums -- as close as I can get them. That makes a lot more sense to me. There is no reason to put your pages in the order in which they're printed. Put them in any order you want.

Hinges: All stamp hinges sold today are apparently made by one company but sold under different brand names. So don't worry too much about which brand you are using! I use hinges only for already-hinged stamps and some used stamps. For everything else, I use mounts to preserve the stamp better -- and also to make it look more elegant. But mounts + stamps make an album very thick very fast, so you'll need more albums. And mounts are more expensive. They add about $30-50 to the cost of each volume I put together compared to hinges. But I think the result is clearly worth it. Do whatever way you think is best.

Whatever, you do, good luck/bon chance.. Et quoi que vous fassiez, n'oubliez pas que c'est pour le plaisir!