Friday, May 1, 2020

1840-1940 stats according to Michel

See below my original blog entry for an important update.

I wrote back in 2017 about a collector who had created a database of Michel catalog information for every country that you could sort by years, country, etc. The compiler has recently updated the information to use 2018/2019 catalog data.

The website can be found at: https://www.germanstamps.net/ia-cost-comparison-ww/

Since Michel no longer makes the data available, this will be the last update.

I think it is well worth visiting the site, and playing with the various filters. But, to get to the bottom line, based on Michel catalog data, there were 66,609 stamps issued between 1840 and 1940 with a total catalog value for used copies of about 14.5 million Euros.

Kudos to PostmasterGS for collecting this data and posting it online.

UPDATE: PostmasterGS has revised his stats. Please see his post on the Stamp Community discussion group.

1840-1940 total: 99,766 issues
1840-1940 total mint CV: 31,978,784 €
1840-1940 total used CV: 19,206,986 €

1 comment:

DrewM said...

Well, that's different, isn't it?

Based on earlier discussions by others here, I believe, my figures say that from 1840-1940 (plus British Commonwealth to 1952) 83,000 stamps were issued worldwide. Excluding Commonwealth stamps after 1940 (not sure why they go to 1952 in whoever's numbers these are), this suggests that somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000 stamps were issued worldwide from 1840-1940 with the higher figure seeming more likely. But let's go with the lower figure and say "over 75,000" stamps were issued in this period.

Michel's figures for the same time period (66,609) are about 10,000 less. That's a lot of stamps missing from the German count that somehow got into the other count of stamps whatever catalogue it came from.

Maybe someday we'll actually know the right figure, but I imagine it will take a catalogue publisher like Scott to tell us how many they know of for that period. Anyone want to phone them up and ask?

(Scott International or "Big Blue" Part I (1840-1940) contains spaces for "around" 35,000 stamps by comparison which is only about half the stamps issued in this period. For later decades. it includes certainly a higher percentage.)