Hingeless Stamp Albums

Continuing the conversation about my new DAVO Luxe hingeless album for Iceland. Started in September, here: stampbears.net/post/204732/thread Note also that there is an earlier thread about DAVO hingeless albums that I did not see around the time that youpiao made the TTS about them: stampbears.net/thread/7034/davo-luxe-album-1st-impression

I finally made some time to start working on transferring and arranging my Iceland collection to the 3-volume DAVO hingeless album. So far, I am not as unhappy with the album as youpiao was. He returned it. Paying $670 (includes sales tax and shipping) for a stamp album for one country is a bit exhorbitant on the face of it. However, the amount of time that I would spend cutting and affixing mounts to other album pages is probably worth the cost, to me. I could get good quality pages from Bill Steiner and even have them printed for me on good stock to save some money, but somebody has to do the labor of attaching mounts to the pages.

Just for perspective of where I am coming from historically ...

• The stamps in my existing WW collection that are mounted are in a Harris 2-volume World-Wide Standard that I purchased for an exhorbitant sum when I was a late teen or early 20-something. I think at that time the album was about $45, which was a significant expense for me at that time. I stripped the stamps from my previous album and mounted them there.
• Over the years, I purchased all the Harris supplements to keep it up-to-date, and interfiled those pages. The 1985 supplement eluded me for almost a decade before I purchased the 1984 and 1985 supplements from another vendor to have spaces for those stamps.
• At some point I decided to include glassine interleaves between many of the pages where there were, or might be stamps.
• As my collecting progressed, I decided that I wanted to have spaces for all the stamps that I might encounter some day and I didn't like having stamps on both sides of that paper. I started to augment the album pages with blank pages with spaces for every Scott-listed major and minor variety. When I began to work on a country, I redid the pages with pencil and ruler on blank pages. My 2-Volume Standard was now something like 12 or 13 volumes of varying thickness.
• Recently, I reached the obvious conclusion that I am never going to collect 99.9999% of the stamps issued in the world, and that I had to trim down my collecting interests. I chose a somewhat arbitrary date, my birth year, and vowed not to collect any stamps issued after that date. Except Iceland. I then proceeded to go through all those albums, removed all the stamps that I had collected that were past that date and donated them to Stamps for the Wounded (SFTW). I also removed all those supplement pages, most of the glassine interleaves, etc.

If you are keeping count, I spent what must be months, if not years, of hours "grooming the stamp album" ... inserting pages, removing pages, sorting supplements, etc. It's insanity. Yes, there was some pleasure factor in there, and probably some soothing of tendencies of ADD or OCD or some other undiagnosed three-letter malady ... but I spent many years doing everything except actually collecting anything except pages. When I decided to "downsize" ... I also decided that Iceland would get my special attention. I had created (pencil and paper) album pages for all the older issues, but I was purchasing year sets, and I was no longer purchasing supplements. Once I had the stamps and souvenir sheets in hand, I needed a place to put them (other than storing the stamps in glassines, which isn't much to look at. Now that Iceland is a "philatelically dead" country, and there will be no new stamps issued (presumably) I could actually get to the business of mounting what I had and trying to fill in those spaces.

But the point that I am getting to (other than my clear lack of forethought) is that the Harris pages are on horrible paper for mounting stamps. I hope that it is at least acid-free. It's thicker than copier paper, but not by much. I know that storing collections in stock books or on loose-leaf stock pages, such as Vario, is an option, but it never really appealed to me. Also, since my discovery of SFTW, and the fact that they are local to me, I have spent far more time volunteering with them than I have allowed for my own stamp collecting. I only learned about the Steiner pages from this forum, and there would be either a time/work factor or cost to obtain them, and we're back to the mounting problem.

Aside ... I am looking at the framing of this reply, and I see the button "Post Quick Reply" and I realize just how long this has become. My apologies ... brevity is not my forte. I hope that I have not violated any rules of forum etiquette by meandering.

OK ... so to the point ... DAVO Luxe Hingeless Iceland Album.

Page 1 (19th Century) has very poor coverage and I will have to create my own pages for the coverage that I wish to have. Those are the first three sets and variations of Icelandic stamps (roughly 2 pages of the Scott Specialized Catalogue). Learning from my past sins, I will only create pages for sets when I acquire at least one stamp from them.

After the first page, coverage of the classic material is good for pages 2 through 6. Iceland is a fairly simple country philatelically. There have not been lots of reprints or color variants that I can see, at least using the Scott catalogue. It might be different if I looked at FACIT as my reference. The pages do not include spaces for the color variants, but there are only a few and there is plenty of free space on each page.

I also worked on the newer material, starting at the beginning of Volume III (2010). I noted in the earlier discussion that I was somewhat surprised to find the souvenir sheets on pages at the back of the album. I guess that is the "DAVO Way." All the souvenir sheets issued in one year are on isolated pages, so I could move them ... but for now I won't. I know where to find them now.

Here the "simplified" part of the album is a bit more significant. They have only one space for stamps that were issued both as a perforated and a die-cut variant. Those are both Scott-listed as major varieties. So, for many years, I will have to add at least one page for "omissions" ... but that is not too much of a disaster. They also did not provide spaces for booklet panes and/or complete booklets of stamps that were issued in that format, but I think that would be a lot to expect of any page manufacturer to provide space for all of those for one stamp issue. Whether I make a page with mounts, or whether I simply insert a generic stock page for these "edge case" situations I will decide later.

So far, having mounted one contemporary year, and through catalog number 166 (I don't have many early stamps), I am not unhappy.

I like the paper thickness and the spacers used. youpiao did not like the bright white color of the paper, but I am OK with it.

Luv my Hagners