Stamp Album French Offices to New Zealand - 1841 to 1950s

North America, United States, New York. A deep blue cloth folio, gilt-lettered on the spine "International Postage Stamp Album, Part II" and stamped on the front board with the collector's name, John G. Williams. The binding and title page come from Scott Publications, Inc., New York, copyright 1947, designed and written by Theresa M. Clark. The leaves inside tell a different story: an incomplete run of Part I pages, roughly the F through N countries, from the French Offices in China through New Zealand, bound behind a title page belonging to another volume. The mounted stamps likewise overrun the publisher's stated window, spanning issues from 1841 into the 1950s: engraved sovereigns, colonial overprints, definitives, and wartime provisionals, gathered and hinged by a single patient hand. Scott Publications began issuing its International albums in the 1870s, and by the mid-twentieth century the series had become the standard armature of the general worldwide collection: pre-printed, illustrated pages that told the collector exactly what existed and, more pointedly, what was missing. The 1947 printing carried cross-references to the 1947 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, the numbering system that still governs the American philatelic market. A word on the mismatch, since a specialist will find it in minutes. Scott's Part I covered the world through 1940; Part II picked up from mid-1940 to August 1946. The title page here advertises the Part II coverage, but the pages actually present are Part I stock for the alphabetical middle of the world, and the run is incomplete. That mismatch is worth stating plainly rather than leaving to discovery: the album is a collector's assemblage, not a factory-intact volume, and its value rests on the mounted material rather than on the completeness of the binding. Theresa M. Clark, credited on the title page as designer and author, was among the small circle of women whose editorial labor shaped American album publishing in the 1930s and 1940s, a contribution rarely acknowledged on the spine. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 199501

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