create your own albumpages

Many stamp collectors started their collections with pre-printed albums. You could buy them rather cheap at the start  but had to pay a lot later on when purchasing suplementary sheets every year. Once I got my first computor I started to experiment to make my own album sheets. That could´nt be too difficult I thought. And it wasn´t. Just drawing a number of squares and placing them where you wanted them to be. This can be done with any simple program on your computor. I  use Powerpoint.

This is just one example how a page could look like.
 Start up by creating a frame around the sheet and save the same to be used for all other pages in your album. You also can save some of the squares since many stamps from most countries appear in repeated   sizes.
As a next step you can print a title for every series or single stamp and below in somewhat smaller letters a subtitle. Here the names of birds. This makes it easy  to place the right stamp into the right place  if you don´t want to print the catalogue number into each square. If you have a special story to tell about one or another stamp, why not put it down in writing. Historical events, anniversaries, famous pleople…. you name it.
To give every page your personal touch depends on your own imagination and creativity. In case you have programs for treating fotos in your PC  you could preferably decorate some of your pages with pictures.  Below some examples of my pages

here some details

If you have read previous advises you probably  also noticed that I did not follow my own intensions.Here I was a bit lazy and did not enter any subtitles under the herbs as I did  with the series "snowwhite animals"

At last some practical hints:

In order to draw the different frames around the stamps ,you must experiment with the size of your page. Once you have zoomed in the correct size  all on your  screen will correspond with the printed page. This conformity is depending on which printer you are using. (in my case size 75%) This enables you also  to compare the size of the frame with the actual stamp when holding it against the screen. Can be timesaving.

Number your pages starting with year followed by serial numbers. This helps a lot to locate any stamp later on amoung all your pages. Here some pages from Sweden year 2012

some items from my collections

Below I show some items of my collections. Not due to any value or that they are hard to come by for any philatelist. I´m just a simple collector and some stamps I like better than other for no specific reason. Now and then I will change the pictures which now can be done more easily in this new blog.

Some postcards  with preprinted stamps  

                                                        and   a    danish postcard which was forwarded by postman on horsback. On the backside of the card  the stamps are cancelled with a special text referring to an agricultural exhibition.

This phantastic painting by the baroque painter David Kloecker Ehrenstrahl is from 1695. Still more phantastic is the fact that the worldfamous engraver Czeslaw Slania put this bis painting liflike into the size of a stamp.

Czeskaw Slania was born in Katowice, Poland and worked for the Swedish Postal Service since 1956. His engravings also can be found on stamps from many other countries and above stamp is his number 1000. (swedish readers can read more in my blog here

And here some envelopes which are signed by this engraver

What is CEPT?

Since I got this question several times from different collectors I here some explanations. The abreviaton is from the french word

Conférence Européenne des Administrations des Postes et des Télécommunications

I´m really happy not being forced to spell out this sentence every time I  speak of these stamps. The first stamps were issued in 1956 in only a few countries; Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. What attracted me at that time was the fact that  stamps from those countries, and later on also other european countries, all showed the same theme. The theme was changed every year and the number of countries participating was ever increasing. This made it exciting and worth wile to collect. The idea of common themes went on till 1973. I do not know why this common idea was abandoned since it originally must have been  a sign of european unity. The themes during these years are shown below

Europa CEPT – annual themes

1974 sclptures

1975 paintings

1976 art - handicraft

1977 landscapes

1078 buildings

1979 postal history

1980 personalities

1981 traditions

1982 historical events

1983 famous works

1984 European conferance

1985 music year

1986 environment

1987 architecture

1988 communication

1989 children´s play

1990 postal facilities

1991 space travel

1992 discovery of America

1993 contemporary art

1994 discoveries

1995 peace and freedom

1996 famous women

1997 fables and legends

1998 national holydays

1999 nature and national parks

2000 startower

2001 lifegiving water

2002 circus

2003 poster art

2004 vacation

2005 gastronomy

2006 integration

2007 scout movement

2008 writing letters

2009 astronomy

2010 childen´s books

2011 forest

2012 visit ….

2013 postal vehicles

2014 music instruments

Now the pictures were all different and I lost interest in collecting them untill my retirement when I took up this collection again. In order to determine which stamps are Europa-cept you have to look for one or other logotype:

If you start collecting Europa-cept  you will have a life-long occupation.Not only you will have difficulties  obtaining all  existing stamps, there also will be a couple of hundred new stamps which are issued every year. Also from new member-states. Below you find a list from which countries you can expect CEPT-stamps

Nevertheless CEPT.stamps continued to come every year but each country now was free to design their own stamps around a given commen theme. See list  below