Comments on: Breaking the mold

By: Rick Young

Rick Young — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:11:42 +0000

I agree it it MUCH slower to make DIY (or use Steiner’s) album pages, but I enjoy seeing a description of the stamp next to it. My plan is to continue to print album pages for Europe but use stockbooks for the rest of my ww collection — a “balanced approach”.

By: Keijo

Keijo — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:07:19 +0000

@Ram… Few years back I did some research where I calculated the total costs of various “stamp friendly” storage methods – http://www.stampcollectingblog.com/storage-summary.php
The total cost of DIY album pages would become over 2x more expensive than use of stock books – even when using hinges!!! I’m not saying the figures I came up are “universal / absolute truth” (as the availabililty and pricing of products ranges from country to country), but I would consider them as a rough guideline that any collector can use as a starting point for their own calculations.

As for being easier… It all depends on how you view at it… Personally I like the stockbook way: just slide the stamp in / out of the sleeve when required. Fast and easy… With hinges and mounts, it gets much more complicated and slower IMHO.

By: Ram

Ram — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:52:10 +0000

Keijo,

Don’t you think it would be easier and cheaper to use DIY pages (from Bill Steiner on CD) & then hinge stamps since you collect used or CTO, you don’t need mounts (which are way more expensive than hinges).

That way you could only print out pages where you have most of the stamps & wait to procure others. You won’t have as many blank pages.

Ram

By: Rick Young

Rick Young — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:09:48 +0000

oh, and an additional advantage is for many african countries i have mint (and unfortunately previously mounted with hinges) stamps and I don’t want to re-hinge them or spend the money on mounts (as i do for mint Europe in my DIY albums). So stockbooks especially seem the way to go when I reorganize them. Now to talk my wife into a nice set of shelves for “the stamp room”.

By: Keijo

Keijo — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 17:38:18 +0000

Hi Hilary,

I agree that separating the sets by space could make the collection pages look more attractive. But based on my “experiments” I’d say that the costs (and increased need of space) could easily become too heavy if applying this into a grand scale collection – for example I expect my collection to house approx. 562 stock books WHEN/IF completed… In that scale even the most modest changes in stamp density easily scale as tens of new stock books…. But I’ve come up with couple of new alternative, more “display friendly” methods I’ll try to write about in near future.