Happy With My New Palo Albums

Several months ago, I undertook a long, comprehensive study of available albums for my Ireland collection: a couple thousand stamps that I accumulated from a new issue service during the career-long, 40-year hiatus I took from active collecting.The stamps were in a stock book and (mostly) in hundreds of glassine envelopes.

I narrowed the field down to hingeless albums, despite their drawbacks (cost, lack of flexibility). As a retired septuagenarian, I didn't have the time or desire to do all that mounting myself. I researched Palo, Linder, Davo, SAFE, Lighthouse, and others. I eventually narrowed it down to Palp and Linder.

I even visited the Palo store in person (its about 20 miles from where I live). Palo, besides selling their own albums, is also the official US vendor for Linder and Davo. The In-person visit allowed me to have a really good look at all options close up--not only how they looked but what it felt like to handle and work with them. And a staff person answered my many questions.

Aesthetically speaking, the Linder albums were probably the winners (also the most costly). But for a number of reasons, the Palo albums (in black and white) won me over--very attractive and sturdy binders/slip cases (if a bit oversized), beautiful heavy cream paper, open feel with ample margins, and Scott-number arrangement (which was a plus for me as a Scott Catalog user). I even liked the Steiner-page layouts (which some on this forum companies about).

Anyway, I just wanted to say that after mounting lots of the stamps and working with the binders and slipcases,I am extremely pleased with the results and have zero regrets about going with Palo. Most of all I have been incredibly impressed by Palo's service. I've ordered the page in batches, and every batch has arrived in record time, well packaged. I've also gotten questions answer promptly and throughly by email and phone.

And most impressive of all, I found about half a dozen pages (so far) that had errors: mounts too small, illustration too small or inaccurate, etc. I reported these problems to Palo, and they cheerfully revised and reprinted the pages, applied the new mounts, and sent the pages to me immediately. It's the kind of service that's fairly rare these days.

--Aquinas

Did you mean complains about?

It is nice to see good customer service.

Yes, angore. Thanks for noting the error. I did mean to say that some on the forum "complain" about Steiner page.

Glad you like your Palo albums. I have had a few Palo albums over the years and do like them as well. They even offer (or at least used to) custom ranges of pages specifically printed. Great company.

FYI: You may already know this, but Palo's page layouts are the Steiner page layouts Bill Steiner designs mainly for self-printing on home computer printers, the ones you purchase for about $50 for the entire world (the last time I checked) and print out yourself. These are usually seen in home-made albums in 3-ring binders and make for a very inexpensive album. Bill Steiner appears to have licensed his page layouts to Palo who then upgraded the pages in a few ways to make a higher-quality album.

Palo does the printing for you, of course, printing on larger paper than you typically see Steiner pages printed on. They also print on heavy weight paper of the kind most album manufacturers use. They replaced Steiner's page border with one of their own and on the larger size paper, the Steiner pages look less crowded than they do on the typical 8.5x11" computer paper these layouts are typically on. You can get Palo's pages with or without mounts attached unlike home printing Bill's layouts where, if you use mounts, you have to add your own mounts -- one by one.

Palo makes their pages entirely proprietary to their brand by using ring binders with four rings so other album pages won't fit into them, a trick most album manufacturers have used for years. Palo pages only fit its 4-ring binders with no other binder options available.

These are not cheap pages, running about the same prices per volume as those of many other album makers. An entire country on Palo pages can run well over a thousand dollars. Other than Scott, still the outlier which keeps its pages much less expensive than most of the other album makers, all major album makers charge a great deal for their stamp albums. This is one reason I use Scott (I add my own mounts) -- but I do very much like the look of the pages Palo produces. If you like loose-leaf style binders, they are very much worth considering. Prepare to pay a lot for them, though, and if you collect a lot of countries as I do (dozens) -- it will get very expensive very quickly.

Palo binders are 5 ring, not 4.

The two outside and middle holes (# 1, 3, & 5) are "normal", and the #2 and #4 holes are in between.

I use other pages (like the cream colored Scott stock pages) in my Palo albums for special purposes and just hand punch the extra two holes by hand.

As I have stated a few times, I have the US Revenue Hingeless pages (printed in B&W). Overall I love them, although there are several locations where the spaces or mounts are too small for the actual stamp size(s). They do look great though!!

Here is an example of a Silver Tax page.

I use Palo hingeless pages for the more random countries that Davo doesn't cover, and find the straight Scott layout convenient and the mounts decent enough. That said, other companies (Lindner, Davo, LH) excel on supplemental stock pages to match the regular album pages, and I've found Palo woefully poor on this front. The mounts significantly warp the pages over time (and not long at that), and I've had to lay in Davo and LH pages to compensate. Seems like it's a known issue, but without a cure in sight unfortunately.

I had given my dad a Palo album for Christmas and noticed this as well. I was not sure if he stored them wrong or something else. I had purchased pages with with multiple strips for spares and these warped the most.