The American Philatelic Research Library is more than just books. We collect many things, including journals, newsletters, microfilm, photographs, research files, and even philatelic music and plates. We do not, as a general rule, collect stamps.
We do, however, have a small collection of stamp albums, some of which contain stamps. We keep the albums for historical purposes, as a record of the development of the hobby. Like most of our special collections, these albums don’t circulate, but they are available for use in the library and staff can scan or copy pages from them.
The albums are arranged geographically and then by publisher. Most are easily identifiable, but a few do not have the name of the company that produced them anywhere on the album. Rather than just file them all under “unknown,” I thought I’d ask readers of the PL&R blog if you recognize any of these albums.
We’ve scanned the covers and representative pages from each and uploaded them to the photo-sharing site Flickr, where you can view all the images. If you recognize one, please let us know by leaving a comment on Flickr.
Could Mystery Album no. 2 be the one referred to in http://www.schwanke-auktionen.de/auction/LotDetail.action?auctionNumber=312&lotNumber=1303 [no illustration there]? The deviant spelling of “Illustirtes” [not “Illustriertes”] is notable.