A stamp album is a book, often loose-leafed (to allow for expansion), in which a collection of postage stamps may be stored and displayed.

Overview

Albums are the nearly universal means for keeping stamps, used for both beginners' and world-class collections, and it is common to characterize the size of a collection by its number of albums.

Album layout

The arrangement of stamps on an album page depends on the taste of the collector and the purpose of the collection. A collection with "one of each" stamp may have rows of stamps packed onto each page, while a specialist's page might have a dozen examples of the same type of stamp, each captioned with a description of printing details or colour shades. Traditional page creation was done with pen and ink; in recent years page layout software and computer printers have become popular. AlbumEasy, available free, for both Windows and Linux, is an example of one of the many page layout programs.

Preprinted albums

Many collectors buy preprinted albums and pages, which are produced by several manufacturers. The gamut ranges from worldwide albums, with only enough spaces for the common stamps and a few more, to one-country albums with spaces for every type of stamp known. The usual format is to print a black-and-white picture of the stamp in each space, reduced in size so that a real stamp will cover it up, and add a thin frame around the stamp. Captions range from minimal mentions of perforation or watermark, up to a paragraph giving a little background on the stamp's subject. Album pages are almost always one-sided; two-sided pages save space, but require interleaving sheets to prevent stamps from catching on each other.