Most collectors use hinges or mounts to affix their stamps. Both methods have things going for them and both have some serious drawbacks.

Hinging your stamps is the traditional method for mounting stamps in an album. You used to be able to get hinges in two sizes, with or without rounded corners, on green or white glassine, and folded or not folded. It addition, they used to be peelable. Now there is only one kind of hinge available. It comes on white glassine. It is folded with square corners. It comes in only one size, and whether or not it is peelable depends on how generous you are in stretching the term peelable. The best of the lot will sometimes peel off, and when it doesn't, the hinge itself will give way instead of the stamp. The worst hinge available will never peel off, and if you try, it will almost always thin the back of the stamp (thins on the back of a stamp are a defect that diminishes the value of that stamp). At present, the best hinge on the market that I have found is made by Prinz in Germany and comes marketed under several names. It sometimes peels, and if you are careful, it will not wreck the stamp when you remove it. The problem with hinges is in the paper they are made from. Good hinges are made from a special glassine that has been double gummed. It is the double gumming that makes the hinge peelable. Since Denison quit making hinges some time ago, no one seems to produce the good quality gummed glassine anymore; and the current makers of hinges make do with what gummed glassine that is currently available. If you have the power to make miracles happen, then make good hinges appear and stamp collectors will remember your name for at least two weeks.

If hinges are not so good anymore, why to people use them you ask? Well, it is because you get 1000 of them for about $1.20. Also, if you are careful not to slobber too much on them when you use them, they perform their intended function well enough. For used stamps and for low value mint stamps,hinges are the only cost effective way to mount stamps. Personally, I hinge almost all of my stamps.

The purpose of hinges is to affix your stamps to an album page with enough holding power so the stamp won't fall off on its own; yet when the time comes, you will be able to remove the stamp from said page at will. The current hinges perform the job in a barely satisfactory manner. The short comings of the current hinges are in the removal area. The other function of the hinge is to allow the viewing of the back of the stamp without removing the stamp from the album page. This is often a useful function when you want to check the perforation or the watermark of a mounted stamp. Yes, many times you can't do this; but that is a characteristic of that particular stamp, not the fault of the hinge.

To use a hinge, barely moisten the short end of the gum side of the hinge and affix it to the top edge of the stamp just below the perforation holes, or as high as you can so the hinge does not show from the front of the stamp. If you affix the hinge lower on the stamp, you will not be able to lift the stamp for viewing after it is mounted without putting a crease in said stamp (creasing stamps is not good--a crease is a defect that affects the value of the stamp). The longer side of the hinge is then lightly moistened and the wet part of the hinge applied to the appropriate part of the album page. Give the hinge a second or two to adhere, and then gently lift the stamp from the page with your tongs. You do this in case moisture adhered to the gum of the stamp causing the stamp itself to stick to the page, which usually results in a thin in the stamp the next time it is lifted for whatever reason (thins in the paper of stamps are considered a defect and lower the value of the stamp). If you exercise care and don't over-moisten the hinge, it does a fine job.

Now we will talk a little bit about mounts. Some collectors feel that those collectors who don't use mounts are either beginners or Neanderthals. I'll let you in on a little secret. Mounts can and do damage stamps when used improperly. In my mind, the major drawbacks to mounts are their cost and the time it takes to use them. Who uses mounts? The major mount users are the mint, never-hinged (MNH) crowd. This fad started in Europe a number of years ago, and it has swept around the world driven mostly by the people who think that stamps are an investment. Why else would someone protect a 15-cent stamp with a 20-cent mount? Actually, there are good reasons to use mounts. I personally use mounts for souvenir sheets (SS). Hinges are very hard on SS's. They are hard to remove safely, and it usually takes at least two hinges to hold a SS; and they usually come loose with time anyway. I also use mounts on better stamps, both mint and used. Stamps are more protected in mounts if the mounts are used properly. What constitutes a better stamp is up to the individual collector. Other collectors feel their stamps look better in mounts, which is fine as long as you are willing to spend stamp money on mounts instead of stamps. In addition, should you ever get to exhibiting your material, you will want to use mounts because they will protect your stamps when the pages are being handled at the exhibition. Now to the drawbacks of mounts. The obvious drawback to mounts over hinges is in price. Mounts are many times more expensive than hinges, and the vast majority of collectible stamps do not have an intrinsic value that justifies the use of a mount over that of a hinge. Once a stamp is in most mounts, it is hard to get at to examine. There are exceptions to this because there are many types of mounts out in the world. The beginning collector should be very aware that it is quite easy to wreck stamps with mounts. For mounts that are split up the back,be careful not to lick over the split. The result of this carelessness is that at best the gum is marked, and at worst the stamp is ruined. In addition, if you make the mistake of not keeping your albums stored upright and you pile them flat, the pressure of the albums can press the stamps in mounts enough that the gum becomes smooth and you no longer have pristine MNH stamps. They may as well have been hinged for what you will get for them. Another mistake collectors make with mounts is to not leave enough room in the mount and the stamp gets its perforations crushed or the stamp becomes creased. The mounts that have a hinge-like capability can easily be crushed when you thumb through your album because they sometimes get pulled up by the opening pages and the page closes down on them before they can flop back into place. Extra care is needed. Some of the mounts that come in hingeless albums are not as secure at holding the stamps in place as are other types, and again extra care in handling the albums is required. I would also suggest you don't use mounts that are self-adhesive. The adhesives used in these types of mounts in the past have bled into the album page on which they were mounted. Lastly, please remember that there is no place for cellophane tape in your album. The adhesives on these tapes will run and they have the potential, over time, of ruining the looks of your album or worse ruining your stamps.

There is another way of mounting your stamps that is used by a lot of specialists and topical collectors. That is the use of stock pages. The advantage of this system is that it allows the collector to continually rearrange his stamps without worrying about potential damage from hinges and mounts. Rearranging is an important necessity in preparing an exhibit and in topical collecting. Stock pages are also a neat way to accumulate material for which you don't have an album or for which no album exists. The drawback to stock pages is that they can cost a lot, and it is quite easy to damage stamps if you are not careful when you put the stamps onto a stock page. Stock pages come in manila with paper slots, black paper with plastic slots, and books with glassine slots. In some cases using stock pages is cheaper than an album, but they can be bulkier; and if you ever have the misfortune to drop one on its top, all the stamps will pop out or at least they seem to.

Back to hinges. Removing hinged stamps from an album page can be tricky. The best way I have found is to grab the stamp with your tongs so that you are holding the stamp and the hinge with the tip of the tongs. Pulling downward gently will usually safely remove the stamp from the page. Remember to hold the album page down with your other hand. Now comes the interesting part--getting the hinge off the stamp. Hold the stamp gently with your fingernail between the perforations and the top of the hinge. Grasp the hinge with your tongs and pull downward parallel to the surface of the stamp away from your other hand. If the hinge is reluctant to come off, sometimes rolling the hinge off by rolling it around your tongs from the side will work. For some of the old post WWII Austrian hinges you must soak them off. Generally, with a little practice the removal of hinges can be safely performed with only an occasional disaster.

Getting stamps out of mounts depends on the type of mount. It is usually safer to carefully destroy the mount to remove the stamp than it is to try to remove the mount with the stamp in it. Some mounts will pop off if you run your tongs gently under them, but the gums on mounts were never designed to be peelable. Generally, a album that has mounts in it is a poor candidate for reuse.

A word about "hinge build up" is in order. With most of the hinges now on the market not being totally peelable, little pieces of hinge tend to build up over the years on the back of the stamps. These are called hinge remnants; and if they build up enough, they can damage the stamp. These remnants can sometimes be peeled off carefully, layer by layer. If they can be safely removed this way, do it. If the hinge pieces don't appear to want to come off easily, don't force the issue. You will thin the stamp. If the remnants look like they are building up too much, soak them off if it is a used stamp. If it is a mint stamp, you can try a stamp lift but get lots of practice first with cheap stamps because lifts can wreck stamps easily if the operator is lacking in experience. As far as I am concerned, a unused stamp with no gum is better than a thinned stamp with original gum, but that is just my preference.