About the service
I lay out stamp collections the way a quiet exhibit is built: first the loose pile becomes order, then the order becomes pages you can show to anyone without apologising for them. My work starts with sorting — by country, by issue, by theme, by the story you actually want to tell — and only after that do I decide what lives in a stockbook as a working fund and what deserves a full exhibit page of its own.
Nothing is ever touched with fingers. Tongs with polished tips, a clean mat, dry hands well away from tea and paper dust: skin oils and salt leave marks that do not show at once but surface a year or two later as a shadow in the margin, and a single careless grip rounds a perforation tooth for good. Hinges and glue I do not use at all. Each item sits in a clear mount or under a transparent strip cut to size, so it can be lifted out and put back without a trace.
Pages are acid-free and buffered, sleeves are free of PVC — soft vinyl sweats plasticiser over the years, and that fogs the surface and softens the gum underneath. The layout itself is plain on purpose: generous margins, one typeface across the whole collection, a caption of a line or two naming the issue, the date and the point of interest, and a reading order that carries the eye left to right and top to bottom. Blank space is part of the design, not a waste of it; a crowded page hides the very piece it was built around.
I finish with the place where it all lives: stable humidity and temperature, no direct daylight, and labelled boxes for duplicates and spares so that nothing has to be dug through twice.
What the work includes: sorting and a written inventory of the material; a plan of what goes to the stockbook and what goes to exhibit pages; mounting in clear mounts or strips; page layout with captions in a single type style; setting up the storage place and the box system for spares.
Nothing is ever touched with fingers. Tongs with polished tips, a clean mat, dry hands well away from tea and paper dust: skin oils and salt leave marks that do not show at once but surface a year or two later as a shadow in the margin, and a single careless grip rounds a perforation tooth for good. Hinges and glue I do not use at all. Each item sits in a clear mount or under a transparent strip cut to size, so it can be lifted out and put back without a trace.
Pages are acid-free and buffered, sleeves are free of PVC — soft vinyl sweats plasticiser over the years, and that fogs the surface and softens the gum underneath. The layout itself is plain on purpose: generous margins, one typeface across the whole collection, a caption of a line or two naming the issue, the date and the point of interest, and a reading order that carries the eye left to right and top to bottom. Blank space is part of the design, not a waste of it; a crowded page hides the very piece it was built around.
I finish with the place where it all lives: stable humidity and temperature, no direct daylight, and labelled boxes for duplicates and spares so that nothing has to be dug through twice.
What the work includes: sorting and a written inventory of the material; a plan of what goes to the stockbook and what goes to exhibit pages; mounting in clear mounts or strips; page layout with captions in a single type style; setting up the storage place and the box system for spares.
