The Power of the Completed Page

Unlike many hobbyists, philatelists strive for completion. Button collectors have the same feeling for the artistic quality of their buttons as stamp collectors do of their stamps. But only a few of the collecting hobbies have a canon of catalogs that you collect against and can offer the feeling that you have truly completed what you set out to do. Even stamp albums are designed with the possibility of completing each page in mind. In the 1920s, the Scott album’s first Airmail page contained a space for the first airmail set and, next to it, the inverted airplane variety of the 24¢ (Scott #C3a). Scott received numerous collector complaints that putting a multi-thousand dollar stamp on the same page as more modest (and obtainable sets) meant that virtually no collector could have the joy of the completed page. Scott soon changed the album design and put the #C3a on a page of its own.

Here are two pages from a collection that we recently purchase that are complete pages. The collector was very proud of these, and they make for a couple of very pretty pages.