The 2014 edition marks the twentieth edition of this essential work for any worldwide collector. The edition is currently available for purchase both in hardcopy and digitally for the iPhone/iPad.
This year there were 6,000 value changes for stamps only listed in the Classic catalog. (The total revaluations is 22,500 if you include varieties in both the Specialized and Standard Scott catalogs.) I normally don’t pay much attention to value change statistics from year to year, but I did find interesting that Scott has changed its value grading for early Great Britain from Very Fine to Fine-Very Fine. To quote the catalog’s introduction, “in today’s market, very few classic Queen Victoria stamps of Great Britain trade as true Very Fine.” Poor centering and heavy cancellation are wide spread. Such stamps “often sell for only 10 percent to 20 percent of the values listed in the catalog.”
Editorially, there has been a major reorganization of Argentina Official Departments and the Portuguese colonies Ceres stamps. For Argentina, the reorganization was done by date, type and perforation with many new images to help in identification.
The Ceres project began with Portugal in the 2013 catalog and moves on this edition to Angola, Azores, Cape Verde, Inhambane, Lourenco Marques, Macao, Madeira, Mozambique, and Tete. The issues are organized by date, paper type and perforation. There has been much renumbering and almost 150 new listings. For the 2015 edition, expect similar treatment of Portuguese Congo, Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese India and St Thomas & Prince Islands.
This is of relevance to Blue collectors because a few of these stamps had been dropped from recent editions of the Scott Standard Catalog even though they are still in the International Volume 1.
There are more than 120 listings for the occupation and annexation stamps of Greece, together with renumbering and reorganization to make identification easier.
Several of the Indian States, specifically Cochin, Gwalior and Travancore have a total of more than 350 new listings. More will be coming in 2015.
I particularly commend the editor, Charles Snee, for welcoming corrections and suggestions (csnee@scottonline.com).
P.S. Did you notice that Scott didn’t hold a contest this year to pick the stamp to adorn the new edition’s cover?
