The Aesthetics of Album Pages

A popular way of collecting is to devote one album page to each stamp issued by some postal authority. At the top of the page, you put an example of the mint stamp and underneath you put a card or cover showing postal use, perhaps as a single franking. Then you provide the necessary written description.

There are two problems with this approach. In many cases, either the mint stamp or the postal item will be very hard to find and very expensive if and when you do find it. So if you are collecting Central Lithuania, it is easy to create a set of pages with an example of each stamp issued at the top. But the postal items? They are scarce and I actually doubt that they exist for some stamps supposedly issued. You will find CTO stamps but even loose postally used ones will be rare or non-existent. So you will end up with a lot of more or less blank album pages.

There is a second problem. If you put a single mint stamp above a nice cover, your page will look unbalanced. Aesthetically, you could improve it by showing a mint multiple rather than a single stamp – maybe a corner block or plate block; or for lithographed stamps, a transfer block. If the transfer block is quite small, as it is for Batum Tree stamps, then you may be able to make rapid progress.

But like Central Lithuania covers, mint multiples are not always easy to find and in some cases probably don’t exist. If you are collecting Imperial Russia, you can buy for four figures a copy of #1 on cover. But, I am afraid I have to tell you, you can forget about a mint block of four.

If I was starting out again as a dealer, I would be tempted to specialise as follows: I would buy old dealer stocks which included mint multiples and part sheets which had never got separated into single stamps. And I would try to create a stock of small blocks, strips and so on for stamps issued say before 1940. They would be MNH** with full gum. As time passes, it will be harder and harder to find those old dealer stocks but even twenty years ago I could have made a lot of progress.