2010 Scott Classic Out November 9th

November is the month in which the latest edition of the Scott Specialized Catalogue of Stamps and Covers 1840-1940 appears. According to Scott, the 16th edition has 2300 new numbered listings, "including 58 for Castelorizzo, 240 for Cilicia, 122 for Fiume, 797 for various French colonies, 123 for Hungary, and 40 for Memel." Also appearing for the first time are French railway parcel post stamps, the Indian Feudatory States of Kotah and Tonk, and Russian postal fiscal issues. Several sections have been reworked and, of course, there are thousands of price changes and price additions (especially for covers and mint never-hinged). By the way, it looks like the Falkland Islands (Scott 74a) 5-shilling King Penguin stamp won the competition for the stamp to be featured on the catalog's cover. For more information, click here.

As far as I know, there is only one competitor to the Scott and it isn't current: Yvert &Tellier Catalogue Des Timbres Classiques Du Monde, 1840-1940 which was last published in 2005. The APS Library doesn't have a copy and I haven't seen it offered by a US distributor. (The only US library showing ownership in OCLC's WorldCat is the Library of Congress.) I can buy the catalogue from a French source at near the retail of 79 Euros, but factoring in shipping, it seems a little steep just to satisfy my curiosity. Hopefully, I'll be back in France before too long and peruse a copy there.

UPDATE 12/29/09: The February 2010 Scott Stamp Monthly contains a multi review of the 2010 Scott Classic Catalogue(pp 10-13, 69). The review is considerably more detailed than the press release linked above. One addition I found intriguing is listings for three-hole punched Hungarian stamps issued between 1921-24 which were I believe defaced by the government to curb speculation. As I have probably a hundred duplicate stamps from this era on stocksheets, I was hopeful that I could find examples of these. Alas, a cursory search didn't turn up any although they aren't always easy to spot. Here is a picture of one from the Poppe Stamps site (the company is selling this one for 49 cents).


UPDATE 1/3/2010. Turns out I had several of these stamps after all, but I did find the holes difficult to see without a magnifying glass.