Expensive Stamp Albums - Apfelbaum, Inc.

The issue of expensive stamp albums threatens the foundation of our hobby. Scott specialty albums retail for a couple hundred dollars each, as do White Ace specialty albums. Hingeless specialty albums and the classy European imports are even more expensive. There are no inexpensive general worldwide albums like the Harris line that so many of us cut our philatelic teeth on years ago. Expensive albums raise the barriers of entry to our hobby. A new collector must spend many hundreds of dollars before he can even begin getting stamps. Young collectors are closed out by the initial expense, and collectors who don’t use albums are rarely as ambitious in their collecting as philatelists who use fine stamp albums. This is because a good album is part of the collecting process and creates demand by laying out pages that can be completed and others that tease and encourage the collector to keep trying. The economics of entering our hobby in the traditional way has become daunting. The Lighthouse hingeless specialty US album in four volumes retails for nearly $1000, which is about the wholesale cost of the 3000 or so different mint stamps that comprise United States 1940 to date. The solution is simple. Traditional mainstream stamp auctions sell hundreds of collections that collectors have made and many of them are in pristine, like new albums. At our auctions, for instance, these lots sell for little more than the value of the stamps that are in them, effectively making the albums free. It takes a bit of looking, but a frugal collector could put together a great set of albums for very little cost.

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