I've already posted a few pages from these Ideal albums on a forum I belong to, but at the moment my main interest is in filling them, so worldwide collecting. I wanted to write something about what I'm collecting and why and how. This first post though is more about the stamps there are spaces for on the pages and how likely one is to complete the album. Or not, because the Ideals have spaces for some very expensive stamps
As an aside, this sort of album simply swallows stamps up, I've already put in over a thousand since I bought the albums and they look no fuller at all
As Jim has noted in his inspirational and very informative blog about filling his big blue Scotts International, the compilers of these one size fits all albums have sometimes made curious choices about which stamps to include and which to exclude. I've never seen one of the Scott albums, although I've bought odd pages from sellers on ebay, which have confirmed what I've read. It seems that at least there's a bit of logic to their general policy in that they tend to exclude all expensive stamps. Which is good if you're someone who needs to fill all the spaces
Stanley Gibbons on the other hand have a different policy. In several - if not most countries - they seem to have included stamps which are out of reach of many collectors unless you get lucky and find an accumulation of stamps with lots of the missing treasures in, so I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm unlikely ever to complete many of the countries, although quite a few pages could get completed. I think one or two choice stamps might be missing from the majority of the pages. Sadly, this page from Bolivia may never have any more of those blanks filled, but actually I'm not too bothered by that, I'm obviously not really a completist.
This page already contains one stamp I'm delighted to have got that I snagged on ebay for pennies, the rather gaudy 2 bolivar stamp with the coat of arms. I never thought I'd get that stamp, used or unused.
Unfortunately I'm going to have to get very lucky to find the missing stamps on this page for the sort of prices I'm prepared to pay. As you can see from the heading this is not even the first page in the album of Bolivian stamps, there's half a page before this of earlier stamps and I very much doubt if I'll get more than a handful of those unless I have an unexpected windfall.
