The collectors material I use

So to complete a stamp album with preprinted pages what does one need as guidance?

As a european and living in France THE catalogue used here is Yvert & Tellier.

I  was made aware by Jim that there exists a special catalogue by Y & T related to 1840 - 1940 period: Classiques du monde.

Very nice but a little bit out of reach for my purse.

That gave me the idea to work with some older catalogues and I came up with the idea of working with catalogues I was able to acquire and were issued as close to the 1840 - 1940 period.

So I was able to acquire an Yvert & Tellier catalogue des Timbres du Monde issued in 1940.

It's the last one which was issued as a hard bound copy with the second world war and paper scarce the 41-45 editions are not very beautiful at all.

The 1940 mentions stamp issues till 1938/1939 so that's ok for me.

Then of course I needed to have a Scott's catalogue because otherwise my classification of the stamps would become more than difficult.

I found a 1943 edition of Scott's Standard Postage Stamp catalogue - Combined Edition.

So here came in an american philatelist and correspondant, John. I let the catalogue be send to him and he was so kind to send it on.

By coincidence I stumbled on a small book containing a  pricelist related to the USA - CSA - Canada stamps and which was released in 1964.

It contains a lot of stamp pictures and has Scott's numbers so that's a nice addition (for me) as well.

Then last but not least there's Big Blue's checklist as established by Jim Jackson and put into a pdf by Chris Whitehouse. My thanks go to them for their work since it really is a wonderful instrument to use when searching / looking for stamps to put in Big Blue.

For anyone interested, the checklist is available here at Big Blue 1840 - 1940.

Here's my copy.

So these are the worktools I will use to check and verify when acquiring stamps to complete my Scott's International Part 1.