Friday, May 15, 2009

Stamp Albums & Glassine Interleaving


Glassine interleaving is large sheets of glassine material that have been cut to the proper size and then punched to fit into stamp albums. If you use a stamp album that has album pages printed to hold stamps on both sides, front and back, then interleaving is an almost essential stamp collecting tool, needed to protect your stamps. Although albums with two-sided pages are less expensive, they have one major drawback: if your stamp albums aren't stacked properly, opened and closed very carefully, or if the pages aren't turned very carefully, they can significantly contribute to damaging your stamps.

Here's how this can happen. If you stack your stamp albums on top of each other, or if you simply place one on a table laying flat (horizontally) every time you move an album its spine shifts a little bit, causing the pages to slide back and forth against each other. The stamps on those pages naturally slide back and forth too, and when there are stamps on facing pages, they can tangle up, causing perforation damage, creases and even torn stamps just by leafing through the album. It's even possible that some minor amounts of printing ink used on the stamps might rub off onto the facing stamps, potentially discoloring them. Glassine interleaving will prevent both of these problems.

Even if you store your stamp albums vertically - as you always should - stamps on facing pages can easily become tangled and damaged, just by virtue of opening and closing the album or by not being careful enough while turning its pages. Interleaving will help prevent this from happening too.

But many (perhaps most) stamp collectors don't use interleaving in their stamp albums, even if they have double-sided pages. Although interleaving definitely has its positive points, it has a bad side too. First of all, because interleaving involves adding additional pages, a fully-interleaved stamp album will be almost double the thickness and weight of the same album without interleaving. You'll need twice as many binders (which can be expensve), and you'll need twice as much room to store your collection. It also takes a lot of time to dis-assemble a stamp album and insert interleaving between every page. And glassine interleaving, although not terribly costly, is an additional expense. It also darkens with age, and after around 20 years it may well need to be replaced.

Before you decide to interleave or not, consider this information and what type of stamps you collect. If you only collect very inexpensive stamps interleaving probably isn't worth the bother or expense. But if you collect more expensive stamps, you may just want to consider either interleaving your double-sided stamp album or, alternatively, migrating your stamp collection to single-sided album pages, which don't need interleaving and just may, in the long run, be cheaper.

No comments: