Do-It-Yourself Album Labels - easy as pie!

So you are building up your stamp collection and eventually you get to the point where you need to seriously consider how you are going to organize and store it.  Everyone does it differently. Some prefer pre-printed stamp albums, others stockbooks or (my choice) stock sheets in binders. Some forgo the book format altogether and use regular boxes. I even saw once on I think The Stampboards Fourm a collector who purchased an old library card catalog cabinent and stored his collection in dealer cards stored in the boxes where the library card catalog records were kept - VERY CLEVER and it looked amazing.

My French colonies collection is reaching a point where I have several lighthouse Vario-F and Vario-G binders to house it.  The Lighthouse binders are wonderful, but they of course have no information on the outside to tell you the contents.  I could just write the name on a self-stick label but to me that isn't really all that attractive.  Now you can purchase labels from Lighthouse for certain nations, or even have custom album labels made by Palo to say anything you want.  But for me, that seemed like paying money for something I could just as easily do at home.

And after experimenting a bit, I discovered it is definitely something worth doing at home.  All you need is an inkjet printer, some good label paper, and a good graphics program such as Photoshop to edit any graphics you might want to include on the label.

Growing up I always thought that albums which had the coat of arms of the nation whose stamps were in the album looked really classy, so I decided that is what I wanted to put on the spine of my binders. Just the coat of arms, not the name of the nation (being trained as historian means I know my coat of arms and flags of nations like the back of my hand).  Since my collections are organized along modern nations, with colonial issues being the first part of many of those nations, I chose to use the coat of arms of the independent nations. For those remaining areas of the French empire *ahem, Departments d'Outre Mer, s'il vous plait* I use their coat of arms as well.

The process is actually quite straight forward.

1) choose the kind of label paper you like.  I am using Silhouette brand printable silver foil. They make a gold foil as well as a transparent (more correctly translucent) printable paper as well. For me, the gold seems a bit too ostentatious, and the transparent made it difficult to see the coats of arms clearly, so silver was a nice compromise. And the pages are 8.5x11 inches and designed to work with inkjet printers that have the capability to print on photograph paper.

Silhouette brand printable silver foil. Restrained refinement perfect for this project.

2) Next I needed the designs of the various coats of arms. In Wikipedia we trust. Coats of Arms are public domain items so downloading the images from the Wikipedia is not a problem. 

3) Once you have the designs, a graphical editing program like Photoshop is necessary to make the images small enough to fit on the spine of the album. I am a huge fan of Photoshop but any good graphic editing program will do, and many of them are free/shareware.  Once you reduce the images down to the right size, you can create a new image file and then, using copy and paste, create a whole page of images.  I could fit twenty of them on an 8.5x11 page.

The balance of the first page of coat of arms labels I printed, having cut out a few already to place on binders.  I can fit twenty coats of arms on a page total.

4) Once you have the graphics done I needed to save the file in a format that would keep the background transparent when printing so that the silver foil would come through. In photoshop that is easy enough just choose save as a .png file.

5) Then you start the printing. In your printing preferences, you need to see the print type to printing photos, paper type to glossy photo paper, and print quality high. Then just load a piece of the label paper in and hit print.  Once done, LET THE PRINTED PAGE SIT SEVERAL HOURS TO DRY. This will help prevent smudging and "set" the designs.

6) Then once you let the labels dry, simply cut out and put onto the binder spine.

 The first three binders with their new coat of arms labels.  The black binder is for French Antilles (Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guiana coat of arms respectively top to bottom), the middle one is for Cameroun, and the one on the right for Gabon.

Easy peasy as Jamie Oliver would say and makes it much easier to find a specific country in my growing collection. And as I am still very much a worldwide collector and plan to focus on other parts of the world as my collecting evolves, I think this will be a nice look for my albums on the shelf.

The only thing I am not certain of, yet, is if over time the labels will be peelable, so that if I need to move a country's collection to a larger binder, I could easily peel the coat of arm label and reuse.  The labels adhere well to the Lighthouse binders, and at least initially do seem peelable within the first couple days of being applied. Long-term though not sure that will remain the case. But given how relatively inexpensive making these labels are, its not a major problem, and one could recycle a binder by putting a new label over the old if needed.

Organizing collections....my preferences.

On the wonderful Stampboards forum there is an interesting thread in the main discussion thread regarding how best to organize a worldwide collection.  My personal preference is to organize based on contemporary nations, with colonial issues placed as part of the historical record. This can get a bit complicated for some nations due to name changes, colonial overship changes and the like. For me, the criteria for what gets put in which country is based on where the administrative center for the entity was located. In practice this means you can have two or more stamp issuing entities as part of the same collection, based on the history of that nation. So, for example :

Senegal was a French colony that issued its own stamps starting in 1886.  In 1944, the French decided to simplify the postal administration of their West African holding by issuing stamps inscribed -Afrique Occidentale Francaise- (French West Africa) for all eight of their West African colonies, including Senegal.  The center of administration for French West Africa was at Dakar in Senegal, so I include these issues in my Senegal collection. Then the "Winds of Change" blew across Africa and in 1960 Senegal and the French Sudan formed the short-lived independent Federation of Mali before splitting into the independent nations of Senegal and Mali. Though catalogs generally list the issues of the Federation of Mali as the first issues of Mali, I personally place the Federation issues of 1959-1960 in with Senegal since the adminstrative center was in Dakar.  So my Senegal album contains in reality four different postal administrations :

Colonial Senegal (1886-1944)
French West Africa (1944-1958)
Federation of Mali (1959-1960)
Independent Senegal (since 1960)

Of course, my academic background as a historian probably explains why I choose this kind of organization!

Speaking of albums, how do I store my collections.  In my first philatelic life before I sold my collection to fund a business venture, I used traditional pages and mounts (I hate hinges with a passion, and would mount hinged stamps in mounts, figuring the poor hinged stamps had suffered enough damage already and did not need any more during my stewardship of their possesion. I had a complete set of Scott Internationals, Brown Vintage Reproduction pages for up to 1940, and then all the volumes up to 2001.

When I returned to active collecting after 2009, one of the first things I looked at was if there was a better, more economic way to store my collection. Stamp mounts are expensive, and the time taken to cut and mount stamps with them would not be the best use of my limited free time. I eventually settles on using Lighthouse Vario Stockpages. They are flexible, come in an arrange of pocket sizes (though I mostly use the 5 and 6 pocket pages. They fit most single stamps nicely.  More recent stamp issues, especially se-tenant blocks, generally fit well in 4S pages). And at least in the USA, Vario pages are CHEAP, with retailers on Amazon and ebay regularly selling packs of 25 pages (that is 50 sides, since the pages are 2-sided) for under US$15.  And as Vario pages fit in standard 3-ring binders (though Lighthouse also makes very sturdy binders that come with slipcase to keep the dust out. Online retailers sell these reasonably as well, I can source packs of 3 of the 3" D-Ring binders and slipcases that will hold approximately 90 pages for US$75 and I am currently using these to hold my collections). So its Vario for me all the way now, and I LOVE it!

But, you may ask, what about organizing the stamps on pages? Stockpages don't have illustrations!  That raises an important question - what catalog do I use. Should I stick to Scott, which has made leaps and bounds in listing variety material in its Classic Specialized Catalog which, while not cheap, is definitely worth the investment, and I have a copy of the 2015 edition. However, having the ability to read French (among several languages) and being rather OCD about being able to have a space for every stamp, including varieties, there are also specialized catalogs to consider. Personally I LOVE specialized catalogs. I may not own all the varieties of every stamp ever issued, but I can at least leave spaces for them, and maybe one day I will win the lottery!  For the French Empire (and France) the choice I made is the Maury catalogs.  They are VERY detailed in terms of listing varietes, including a LOT of items NOT listed in Scott, from the dozens of overprint variations on the 1904 Guadeloupe surcharge provisionals to the several hundred Parcel Post stamps issued released by the colonial Algerian postal administration (which Scott does not list, though it does list the mainland French ones - why not Algeria's Scott hmmmm???) The Maury catalog splits the French empire into 4 different volumes organized primarily by region.  They are a gold mine of information and it is how I organize my collection.

But how does that tell me where to put a stamp once I get it.  To solve that conundrum I simply created excel diagrams with the Maury number (or Scott for post-independence issues Maury does not cover) in each cell.  Vario pages have rows 215 mm long (height depends on number of rows per page). You can fit 8 standard 25x22mm definitives on a row using Lighthouse pages, while bigger stamps like the French colonial pictorial can fit 4 to 7 depending on the orientation of the stamp.  So its just a matter of creating a "map" and then using it as I get stamps.  I print the pages out and highlight the numbers that I acquire, as shown below for Senegal :

Easy-peasy as Jamie Oliver would say. So that is how I have my collections organized, it works very well for me though some will probably find it a bit too OCD especially when using specialized catalogs. Each to his or her own, the one rule in stamp collecting is that you collect the way that gives you the most pleasure, and be willing to try new ideas as your colleciton grows over time.