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.