Show your DIY album pages

I expect to finish my Albania album next week.
A4 double sided which information on the left-side.

All pages are a mix of stamps, plating/varieties, postmarks, postal history, general history, maps and images that tells the story behind the stamp.

classicalstamps , these pages are epic. Just from reading the ones you posted, I learned a lot of things I either never knew or knew only as isolated facts without any context in which to fit them. Historical philatelic analysis at its finest. Thanks!


Beryllium Guy , I had to look up "stock sheets" and I still didn't get very far, though that might be me. Are the Hagner sheets similar to Varios? If not, what are the differences?


iswscwebmaster and angore , you both got further along than I ever did. Much further, and my sincere congratulations.

I decided one fine day to typeset my late uncle's typewritten doctoral dissertation in LaTeX and then put a .pdf of it on the web for people to read, all the while learning about LaTeX, or such was the plan. 110 pages, five months, about 75 document-generation-fault messages that might as well have been written in cuneiform, and a nice fat hit of bursitis later, I had a document with a lousy font I didn't pick out, random variations in the font size, line spacing, and indents, footnotes that had nothing to do with anything, and more spelling errors than I usually make in three years.

I ended up finding some freeware that did a crappy but serviceable enough job of converting LaTeX to Word 97 (sometimes you take what you can get and smile about it), converted that pile of slop to ASCII, ended my longtime love affair with GNU Emacs, got a Windows computer, changed my legal name to Ptolemy Eggdog, and renounced the world and all its illusions. I was going to start over in LibreOffice, but I didn’t get very far. I couldn't face going through the whole thing again; and along the way, I showed part of it to two ministers (the author, my uncle, was in divinity school, and the dissertation was about John Milton of Paradise Lost fame), and neither of them were very impressed with the content.

Pieces of the dissertation are still sitting on my computer somewhere, I think.

First mark-up print (on white paper)  France Sage Type II 2 centimes  Yvert #85  m,If I find a really nice cancellation I might add a space, but this far, nothing earth-shattering as I separate by Types and group by colors

If anyone sees something I've obviously missed please let me know!

You might consider having the same horizontal distance between the boxes. Now you have 3 different (see my 3 identical red lines).
It will make the page "easier on the eye".

I really like the idea of key or description sheets on left side but you have to really plan ahead unless you start using protective sleeves so you can put two pages back to back.

I also get stamps mounted on cut up Vario or Hagners. I toss the better ones in a box so also collect those along with stamps.

Experimenting with some concept pages for stamps from every country album variation.  My take was trying to not restrict to just one stamp.

Yes, that is my intention, I also experimented with a horizontal rule. The line is to just have a baseline to add stamps.

Hi! My first "true" post here: as a student I don't have much budget for my stamp collection and progress rather slowly, but I love reading other people's discussions.
I want to share the first pages of a Buzin Birds album I'm currently working on: formatted for European pages (27*29 mm) using Affinity Publisher and xnConvert for the BW conversion. The concise descriptions are from ebird.org.
Tips and feedback are very welcome!

My Belgium collection goes, officially, to 1980. I sometimes wonder if I should keep going, at least through some of the more recent definitive series, and I think you just talked me into it. I tend to write up descriptions of the various wonders of nature I find on stamps, but not with the detail you do.

I find nothing to criticize in the layout, which is excellent. I didn't even find any typos. (I made my living as a proofreader for a number of years, and I still read that way - partly because it's a habit, and partly because my personality got deformed in the process and I get a pathological sort of joy in pointing out mistakes .) What does "Perches up considerably" (African stonechat) mean?

Isn't Affinity Publisher excellent? I'm so happy not to have to rent InDesign by the month (and I'd say that even if InDesign worked better than it does) without having to sacrifice a single function that I can imagine myself ever needing.

I also create my own album pages, however I cheat and use the White Ace blank pages then overprint them with the borders frames and information about each stamp, I like the White Ace pages because they have specific country headers and they fit in my printer. I collect Denmark and Ireland currently, creating my own pages gives me the ability to collect errors, varieties, unlisted oddities. None of which are usually found in a preprinted album. I create a lot of color pages but limit the number of stamps on each page and tend to all a lot of information and with errors and varieties, I like to show same stamp without the oddity beside it.

I would include an image, but haven't been successful in uploading images yet.