Saturday, December 3, 2022

Album pages common designs - 1. 1935 Silver Jubilee

The 1935 Silver Jubilee set is the first set with a common design for not less then 44 countries and territories, that are or were part of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
The group of 44 can even be extended with 18 more countries/territories, that issued stamps for the same anniversary, but who did not choose the same design.
Although strickly seen they are not 'common designs', I have added the stamps to the album, as they are often collected as part of the full set.

1935 Silver Jubilee CD 301

The set depicts the 25th anniversary of the reign of King George V, in 1935.
Besides the face of the king, we see Windsor castle.
The first group with exactly the common design, consists of 44 countries, each issuing 4 stamps.
In the extended group of 18 countries, we find issues with 2 stamps only, and issues with up to 7 stamps.
Both parts together, result in 245 stamps for this collection.

Below is a clickable link, to a PDF-file, with the full set on album pages.
(a free PDF-reader is needed to open the file)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yWMtDmw5p2PdGI_Y8Urnm9udKnIXBFud/view?usp=share_link
CD 301 : Silver Jubilee 1935

The pages were made by me, with the AlbumEasy program.

screenshot PDF
A full, step-by-step course can be found on my blog, starting here https://rainbowstampsandcoins.blogspot.com/2021/04/making-your-own-album-00.html

This link leads to the introduction page, all further lessons can be found in the blog archive (lesson 1 to 40).

Please let me know in the comment section, if there are mistakes (size, information, ...), I will gladly update the file if necessary.
For those who work with AlbumEasy, and who want to alter fonts, page sizes (US) themselves, drop me a message too, and I will send the .txt-file for this album.

Please note that catalog numbers are omitted in the album, as they are depending on the used catalog.

to be continued ...

Friday, December 2, 2022

Album pages common designs - 0.1 Introduction

In my search for customized stamp albums, I found many ready-to-use albums for collecting by country.
Lots of collectors have themed collections, and of course it is not that simple to create albums for such collections. First of all, because thematic collections often requires thematic catalogs - which exist, but only for limited topics (chess, cats, light houses, Disney, ...)
Secondly because most thematic collectors also add personal information, covers, ... to their collection, which makes it nearly impossible to create a tailor-made album.
Even if I would try to add such an album, it would always be too limited, or too elaborated.

There is however a group of collectors/collections, that keep the middle between a country wise collection and a thematic collection.
A good example is a collection of 'common design' stamps.
They combine stamps from different countries, but are not that excessive in the number of stamps that should be in the collection.

In this view, there are two large groups of possible collections.
The first one is the group of the joint issues.
Many countries have common issues with other countries, celebrating XX-years of diplomatic relations, famous people who lived and worked in two or more countries, international treaties between two countries, ...

Example of a joint issue between Kenya and Uganda

Those joint issues, are often collected, but not often described in catalogs.
Some joint issues, do not bare exactly the same image, which makes it also difficult to recognize them.

A second group of stamps that are in these 'country + theme collecting group', are those of the common designs.

More then a simple joint issue between two or 'few' countries, celebrating a mutual anniversary, the stamps in the 'common design' group, have identical stamps or sets of stamps, issued by a large group of countries that share a common history.

A good example here is the 1935 Silver Jubilee emission.
With the country name omitted, it can be an issue by many countries.

Common design 1935

For this group, there are a number of sub groups that I will explore.
1. The group of the CEPT issues - mainly european countries that issue(d) stamps on a common theme.
The first years they also had a common design, nowadays the topic is common, but the designs are different.
2. The group of the Portuguese and former Portuguese territories, that have issued common designs since 1898!
3. The (large) group of French and (former) French territories, who issued stamps with a common design, often with topics of local - mainly African - live and costumes.
4. The also large group of British and (former) Commonwealth of Nations issues. Here the common designs are often British royals and royal anniversaries.

Most European collectors are familiar with this first group, Portuguese, French or British collectors will be familiar with the other groups.
Scott mentions these groups in the catalog too.

In this set of articles, I like to concentrate on this second group of stamps.
And I will try to include pdf pages for collectors of these themed collections too.

to be continued...