The pages and images are restored. Keep reading. But as of 30 June 2004, I will no longer be able to offer stamp album pages or stamp images that use the Scott Numbering System, due to a cease-and-desist letter I received from Amos Hobby Publications.
Dear Mr. McGee,
It has come to our attention that you are using the Scott numbering system to describe stamp images on your stamp album pages available at http://www.mcgees.org/stampalbums.html.
Scott Publishing Co. is the owner of federally registered copyrights on its stamp numbering system and the contents of the Scott catalogs. Use of the Scott Numbering System without a written license agreement from Scott Publishing Co. is not permitted.
We must insist that you immediately cease and desist from any further use of the Scott catalog numbers as well as offering any downloads containing the Scott numbers. This includes image names using Scott numbers for identification purposes.
Sincerely,
Donna Houseman
Rights Manager
Amos Hobby Publications
911 Vandemark Road
Sidney, OH 45365
937-XXX-XXXX
I have recreated the pages and images in a way that does not use Scott Numbering. Do note that I wrote these scripts and set up this page before I found Bill Steiner's amazing StampAlbums.com. He has over 40,000 U.S. and foreign stamp album pages available for download. The pages do not have pictures of the stamps on the sheets, just blank rectangles, but they are beautiful. $20 buys you a year's subscription to the website, where you can download as many pages as you want. I now use Steiner's pages rather than my own! If you are just looking for stamp images, you may also be interested in the new site called Diphy.com: their goal is to provide a catalogue, with images, of all US stamps. If what you want are free U.S. stamp album pages with pictures of the stamps, keep reading.
I set out looking for a cheap way to sort my stamp collection. I did not want to hinge my stamps, but I did not want to pay the high prices for a hingeless album. I like the flexibility of a stock sheet but I wanted the convenience of a space for each stamp with a picture behind it. I decided the best method for me would be to use six-row stock sheets with black backgrounds and place a printed slip of paper behind each row. Then I would have an acetate covering, an image of each stamp, and would not have to shell out too much money.
It was tough finding a free source of stamp images, but to our luck IBM used a database of U.S. stamp images to demonstrate their QBIC technology (they have since removed the page, probably for the same reasons, but it used to be found here.) The interface to this database was through a Java applet, and their image directories did not allow directory listings, so I figured out their directory structure and wrote a program to crawl it.
After running this script I had 162 MB of stamp images on my hard disk. I did not want to lay out over 2500 stamp images by hand, so I wrote a script to assemble the images into strips of the right size and insert each stamp's Scott number above the image. Then I wrote a tiny script to stitch strips in groups of six into a full sheet; this I could print out on my printer, then use a guillotine paper trimmer to disassemble it into component strips. To do the printing, I took each block to my PC (I do not have a printer connected to my Linux box), converted each page to grayscale with Paint Shop Pro, and printed them out on my Deskjet printer.
You have the choice to download the pre-made pages or the individual stamp images:
Download the pre-made sheets (in Windows, use WinZip to open the file) [10M]
Download the stamp images in big chunks (in Windows, use WinZip to open the files):
Let me state a few problems off the bat. The IBM database contained the vast majority of U.S. stamps, but it looks like a few missed getting into their system. Also, my script was not designed to download variants of stamps (Scott #537c, for instance) so my scripts will not pick these up, and the images will not show up in the stamp image directories or the pre-made sheets, regardless of whether or not they were in IBM's database.
Some stamps are not to scale. This is their fault. ;-) The way it is currently set, some stamps images are the right size and some are too small. You will have to overlap stamps in these cases; if you do not mind doing this, this also allows more stamps to fit on a sheet. Also, this means that the images of some souvenir sheets are shrunk to the size of an individual stamp. I suggest retaining these as convenient markers and holding the actual souvenir sheets in other pages in the album.
You need to be careful with putting ink and paper behind your stamps. Just keep your wits about you: if you are worried, use acid-free paper, make sure your ink/toner does not have harmful plasticizers in it, etc. If you have ultra-rare or valuable stamps, or if you are very concerned, you should pay for a better way to house them.
Enjoy.
|