the Smithsonian "A Stamp for Every Country"

That's a very nice project. If I decide to take up the challenge, my selection parameters will be:

1) Map of country
2) Seal or Coat-of-Arms of country
3) Flag of country
4) Ruler of country

That should cover most of them.

OK, found the older thread, although now I'm thinking there might have been another one as well...

"A Stamp for Every Country" Album

sharonb , I began accumulating stamps for this album several years ago, when it was still posted on the website of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. If I recall correctly, there are spots for 785 stamps in the album and, according to my checklist, I have stamps from 548 of them. I undoubtedly have more, though, because I have many stamps that I haven’t had the time to go through yet and I’m sure that I’ve forgotten to check a few off along the way. As the membership of the Universal Postal Union currently stands at 192, it means that the majority of the stamps for the album are from “dead countries.”

My original plan was to print out the album as is, but due to it being in landscape format rather than portrait format, I decided to wait and make my own pages. There are also several errors scattered throughout the album, such as Tannu Tuva and the USSR being listed under Romania, and I can fix those by making my own pages. Eventually, I would like to use the Smithsonian album as a template and use AlbumEasy to make a page for each entry in the album. My pages, though, will include a map and flag or coat of arms of the area, as well as a brief history. Also, my pages will be in portrait format. JohnnyO has 2 threads on this forum concerning the Stamp From Every Country album and, in one of them, he reoriented the pages from landscape to portrait format.

Many of the needed stamps for the album, as well as being hard to find, can be quite expensive and many of the stamps needed are also prone to being forged. A guy on another forum actually completed the album and he figures that he has about 900 hours invested in looking for the stamps needed to finish it. He came up with a novel way to fill the spaces of the prohibitively expensive stamps though, as many of them are considered to be classics (such as Basel), they are usually available on modern stamp-on-stamp issues rather cheaply.

Good luck working on the album!

Back when I was spending more time on the album, I Googled “Stamp From Every Country Album” and one of the results led me to Stamp Bears for the first time. And you guys have been stuck with me ever since!

I’m not exactly sure when, but Terra Nova Publishing, now defunct, once published the Single Specimen World Gazatteer Stamp Album, which is basically an earlier version of the Smithsonian album. I’m not sure how many spots are in the album, but I’d like to have one and I looked for one of these for what seemed like forever, with no luck. I still check eBay occasionally and, hopefully, one of these days I’ll run across one! If anyone ever sees one and you aren’t interested in it yourself, please let me know!

I like the "Single Specimen" type book since you have more flexibility. With the information, it can serve as a reference even without the stamps. The scope of "every country" is subject to debate.

I've just looked at the UN Kosovo stamps listed under UNMIK in my Michel UN catalogue (and the first two sets in my old SG Balkans catalogue listed under UN (Kosovo)) and while I generally like the designs, the country name is the longest I remember seeing used regularly on stamps and so it's in very small print.

On each stamp the country name reads:

"UNITED NATIONS INTERIM ADMINISTRATION MISSION IN KOSOVO"

plus the same again in, I assume, both Albanian and Serbian.

I'm not so sure UN's various deployments should even be included in all this, since they're allegedly more in the nature of transition regimes than permanent political structures for those areas.

True, but I'd definitely count East and West Germany, and the Koreas.