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Albums - Glassine Interleaving:

Glassine interleaving is another of those things that have two sides to the story: a good side and a not so good side. Interleaving is sheet glassine that has been cut and punched to fit into stamp albums.

Why might it be necessary to use one may ask? Well, it appears necessary if you have album pages that are two sided (printed to hold stamps on both sides of a page). The major drawback to two-sided album pages is that they can contribute to stamp damage if not handled with extreme care. For instance, if you incorrectly store your albums by stacking them in a horizontal pile, every time you move them the spine of the binder will rotate slightly on its long axis. This causes the pages to slide back and forth over each other, which results in the stamps on those pages rubbing back and forth over each other. When this happens, the colors of some stamps rub off on the stamps on the opposite page eventually ruining both stamps. By putting glassine interleaving between the pages you will stop this. Regardless of how you store your albums, every time you move them the pages will rub back and forth but not with the pressure as in the above example. If this sliding of pages is large enough, stamps will get caught on each other which can result in tears and mashed perforations thus ruining the stamps. Interleaving will prevent this. When you thumb through your album, stamps can get caught on stamps on the opposite page and get creased. Interleaving will prevent a lot of this, but not all if you are careless. Seems like interleaving is the way to go, doesn’t it.

There are a lot of reasons why people don’t use interleaving, and most collectors don’t. By using interleaving, you almost double the thickness of your collection. This means you need twice the number of binders as before and binders are not cheap. It takes a lot of time to take all your albums apart to insert the interleaving between each page. Glassine is compressed paper, and as a result it is heavy. It will almost double the weight of your albums. While glassine is not all that expensive, you will need a lot of it for a set of worldwide binders and that can add up to a bit of money. In addition, the paper used to make glassine is not the best in the world. In about twenty years it will darken and this darkening will affect the album pages and the stamps on them. This means that as soon as your glassine interleaving starts to darken around the edges, it needs to be replaced

If you are considering interleaving, you need to consider all of the above and think about what kind of stamps you are collecting. People who use two-sided albums generally don’t collect valuable stamps and don’t worry about the condition of their stamps to the extent the never-hinged crowd does. For these collectors, like myself, who collect cheap stamps there is no justification for the cost and time needed for using interleaving. If you are going to collect good stamps, why not buy one-sided specialty albums in the first place? Two-sided albums plus interleaving plus your time might cost more than buying specialty albums (if you buy them used with collections in them the albums are often free). Think about what you are going to do before you do it. It will save you time and money. If you already have two-sided albums, often interleaving in selected areas solves a lot of problems.

Ken Stewart