Now that I had built up a good selection of stamps dating from 1840 to 1951, I started looking at Lighthouse albums on Ebay. Lighthouse albums are sturdy pegged loose-leaf albums with preprinted pages. You affix your stamps with hinges or ideally mounts. The page is arranged in a way that roughly equates to the most common stamp catalogues.

There seem to be two types of Lighthouse albums, some with black covers that look very similar to the Davos two-peg loose-leaf album and some with green padded covers with two pegs and two upper pegs. I managed to find a black Lighthouse album on eBay for £20. It had preprinted pages from 1840 to 1985, but it was in bad condition and didn’t have any mounts. It had a few stamps but most of them were in very bad condition. some of the stamps looked like they had been dipped in oil. In the 1980s this would have been a very expensive album, certainly, something that I could only have dreamed about owning back then and the condition of the stamps made me feel sad. Whoever had the album maybe didn’t like stamps or didn’t have their heart in it.

I already had a good green Lighthouse album from the 1990s, so my aim was to transfer the pages 1840 to 1951 from the black Lighthouse album into my existing green one. The black album’s pages are on thinner paper that the 1990s (onward) Lighthouse pages, so I reinforced the part of the area of the page towards the spine by glueing on a piece of card. I then punched an extra two holes, so that it matched the peg position of my green Lighthouse album.

Here is a video explaining what I did:-