Stamp Collecting Starter Packs - the Sequel

Back on March 6, I published a post all about the Stamp Collecting Starter Packs that North Toronto Stamp Club member Lisa Tam described in the NTSC's March 2024 newsletter. Well, I'm happy to report that all four of the Starter Packs have found their way out of the free neighbourhood library just around the corner from our house!

On our neighbourhood walks, I put one pack in the library per week. (OK, one week we didn't walk due to the unseasonal weather!) And one by one, they all disappeared. I have no idea where they went or who has them, or whether the library owner just removed them and trashed them (boy, I hope not)! I have to believe they have found a good home. So, of course it was time to produce more. This time, as a sequel, I built six packs, each containing 60 stamps. About 20 topicals (space, animals, sports etc.), 10 US, 10 Canada and 20 worldwide including some CTO. The assembled pack contents on my Michaels lap/sorting tray:

Using Lisa's printed pdf backer sheet that I colour-printed and cut, I also included a sky-blue yardstick piece (since I didn't do two-sided printing) and stapled the 'Casper Crystal Clear Self-Sealing Bag' from the dollar store all together. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll place these in the library in our walks and see what happens!

Levelling the Album Playing Field

Ever since I began my Long and Noble Crusade a year ago, I've been albumizing stamps. First from the Keep baggie, then from the sorted-by-country two-row box of glassines, and recently, from recent stamp-show-finds sorting, and most recently some Keep baggie British Commonwealth! I ended up with a 1.5 inch-thick file folder of album pages (below) ready for mounting in my four Traveler albums (top photo).

Some of my own pages, designed in MS Word, mounted and ready to go in albums. As my Dad used to say, you can never go wrong with 'British Colonials'!

I knew that my albums would be bursting if I added all those pages. And since I haven't come across a fifth Traveler album, it's probably best to hold the line at four albums for all those smaller country collections.So, like the breaking-out of my Germany, France, West Indies etc. into new albums, I decided to remove Switzerland, Netherlands and Scandinavia for separate albums in future. I then went through the rather laborious, though enjoyable process of removing ALL pages from ALL albums, so they could have the new pages interleaved and all four albums 'levelled' so the covers wouldn't be under pressure! I added some reinforcements to punched holes and double-checked the order of the pages. Broken-out countries (below - left) with two albums' worth of loose pages stacked at right:

Feeling empty as a drum:

The removal complete, all pages stacked at right totalling about 5.5 inches of compressed height. I toyed with various ideas of levelling: actual levelling with a level, weighing, etc. I wanted each album to start and finish cleanly, country-wise and thickness-wise. 

A variety of original Traveler pages, photocopied pages, pages from more than one album, pages I printed myself, and Canadian Wholesale Supply pages - all of varying sizes but each needing two holes punched to go into the original two-post binders. Only one of the Travelers is my original one - other three have been bought at stamp shows, and the fourth has a plastic, not cardboard binding with posts inside.

Levelling underway! Each album's about-to-be pile of pages was a compressed height of 1.5 inches. Ish.

The finished products! All punched, put on album posts, screwed in and ready to shelve:

You can see the basic cardboard albums are looking well-used. And that's the way we like them!