The ABC’s of Displaying Your Stamps: Paper, Plastic, or Glassine

Until the 1960’s glassine was one of the mainstays of stamp collection display materials. It, however, is not acid-free and has very small amounts of sulfuric acid in it that can damage your stamps. These days there are specialty acid-free papers that can be bought that will not hurt them. Japanese rice paper can also be used, but this can be expensive.

Collectors, for the most part only put stamps on one side of a page. This is because it provides the best protection, though it does mean you need more pages and binders to keep your stamp collection in. The reason for putting stamps on one page only is because you get more tearing and scratching of the surface of a stamp when you have stamps facing each other, as opposed to just touching a blank sheet of paper.

To display individual stamps, because of cost, people will sometimes use plastic sleeves as an alternative to glassine, but with time and humidity, these can stick together and sometimes will stick to your stamp, so plastic is not a very good choice. Other materials like Mylar are good, but they are expensive and so not many people use them.

The best of all mediums for preserving your stamps is glass or some special types of plastic, but as we note above, this is too expensive and takes up too much room for people with more than just a few really precious stamps that they want to preserve.

Like any work of art, you must keep your stamps out of direct sunlight where UV will fade them. The same can be said of some types of strong house lighting.