This November brings the 24th edition of the 2018 Scott Classic Catalogue. There are more than 17,000 changes in catalog values. I have trouble getting excited about trying to enumerate these so I'll just point you athttps://www.linns.com/news/us-stamps-postal-history/2017/november/2018-scott-classic-specialized-catalog-available.html
It is worth noting that there are price decreases as well as increases. And there are valuations for some stamps in various conditions and formats for the first time.
In terms of editorial content, many notes and footnotes have been reviewed for accuracy. There are 3 major numbers and almost 230 minor varieties added for New Zealand. Other additions include Azerbaijan, Fiume, Hejaz, and Saudi Arabia. And there are improved scans for some stamps.
The cost is $174.99; $154.99 direct from Amos Advantage.
16 comments:
Thanks for the update. It is a bit jarring to see real price decreases for CV, as we are somewhat always expecting price increases. ;-) I do think though it reflects the reality of our hobby today.
And Kudos to Scott for continually improving the classical era catalogue.
If one had to point out why WW collecting has rebounded in popularity, Scott's 1840-1940 catalogue availability may be the number one reason.
I would definitely agree that the availability of the Scott 1840-1940 catalogue is a major factor. Somehow, I now have editions for 2000, 2006, and 2017 for it! First one is black and white images only while the 2006 version has color pictures.
It will be interesting to see if the new Michel catalogue will jump start a classic album movement in Europe in a similar fashion. Availability of a print on demand album similar to Deep Blue for the period that could be printed by country would go a long way to popularize it as an option I expect. Even better if it could be generated from a text file similar to Album Easy's approach which creates a PDF document for printing from an easily readable and editable text document.
Yes, its really nice to have everything in a single catalog. I've had a 2011 edition for a few years now and mark the stamps that I have in it using a colored highlighter. Nice to carry to stamp shows. I'm hoping to get a 2017 edition for Christmas.
It will be interesting to see if the new Michel catalogue will jump start a classic album movement in Europe in a similar fashion. Availability of a print on demand album similar to Deep Blue for the period that could be printed by country would go a long way to popularize it as an option I expect.
The day European collectors move back to hinges & hinging is the day hell freezes over (that
said, it did happen once when Finland won the Eurovision Song Contents years back, LOL). The position of stock books and stock pages on this part of the world is very strong (at least 80-90% of collectors use and prefer them instead of hinges).
-k-
Interesting, I would expect use of mounts perhaps rather than hinges but would not have thought that stock books and pages would be considered to be a real alternative to traditional albums. Then again there are a lot of albums that seem to have been created in Europe that were essentially blank pages with country headings that regularly appear on eBay so perhaps the move to stock books and pages seems more reasonable given that possible historic tendency.
Somehow it has never really occurred to me to create collections in stock books. I've always worked with printed albums with pictured images (although I have used hingeless albums for primary collections). My forays into world albums involved a starter collection which had mostly hinged, mint stamps although I had never made many additions to it until I started moving the stamps from the Supreme Global to the International albums which seems to have increased my new acquisitions dramatically. My only use ever of stockbooks was for a place to put a limited number of duplicates but mostly I had added them to glassines in dealer stock boxes rather than stockbooks.
I wonder what motivated the shift by European collectors away from traditional albums or have they been less popular with European collectors always. I have recently purchased several DVD based collections of older stamp collecting based books and will try to see if they point to a rationale for this stamp storage alternative. If anyone has any thoughts on the subject I would appreciate hearing from them as well.
@albumfilling.... It's myriad of reasons.
For starters nobody in Europe hasn't produced/marketed an affordable worldwide album with illustrated pages in past 40-50 years. Most of the options went to ashes with flames WW2, and cold war did the rest. Some brands managed to survive to 1960/70s.... Basically the surviving worldwide albums (such as Schaubeck) became the Lighthouse/Leuchtturm, Davo etc. country-specific hingless pages that are now sold worldwide.
Which brings me down to reason number two... The rise of stock books and stock pages comes largely down to cost and production technology. A country-specific album is and has been deadly expensive. A Lighthouse binder with pages just for Finland is about 400€. For the same money you can buy twenty(!!!) 64-page stockbooks. The difference in storage capacity is HUGE even if you laid the stamps very sparsely on the pages.
And third... Stock books / pages are fast & easy to use. No need to play with hinges or mounts. A skilled collector can easily work at '200+ stamps per hour' speed when using stock books/pages.
-k-
I still see stock books best used as "storage" rather than "display" of a collection.
By the way, I have one "nice" Lighthouse stock book that the glassine interleaves have begun to wrinkle, which is now causing the stamps to wrinkle. I need to get my stamps out of that stock book as soon as possible!
Thanks to all for your enlightening comments. I am of the school that believes that much of how we collect stamps as adults harks back, at least subconsciously, to how we collected as kids. I put stamps in albums as a young collector and that is what I still like. Stock pages were what you saw at dealers, and in the olden days, these were manila. Although I use modern stock books, the manila ones bring back far nicer memories. Perhaps it is the holiday season that is making me nostalgic.
Bob, I think you are on to something with what we used as we began collecting tends to carry forward. I, also, find that I consider fresh manila stock pages as the most attractive of their type. Oddly I just don't like black backgrounds which eliminates many stock book sources as well especially many of the later ones. I will admit that I tend to collect to an album while an empty stock book is just too open ended for me. :)
Unknown, the lack of European produced traditional world wide albums since before World War II is likely a significant factor as well as the cost differentials.
ChrisW, I, also, find that I tend to use stock books and/or dealer stock cards as storage for duplicates rather than a collection storage mechanism.
Just got the 2018 Scott Classic from Santa this year!!
Keijo's comments are interesting. I had not known that stock books were so widely used as stamp albums in Europe. That's not nearly the case in the U.S., or at least I haven't seen much evidence that many U.S. collectors use stock books as their albums, though certainly some do. On the other hand, there is a similar backlash here against enormously expensive stamp albums. It's in the form of the print-your-own album pages movement sparked by the Steiner pages. I think his were the first. So, we both seem to be trying to cope with similarly high expenses in our hobby but in two different ways.
I won't weigh in on the appeal of stock books except to say I prefer paper album pages, either printed or blank. I'm a "paper guy" and have never like all the plastic that has crept into the hobby very much. I like to keep it simple. Of course, I use a lot of stock books -- a few dozen, in fact -- for all my duplicates and stamps in the "waiting room" before going into albums. If only I had albums for all of them! Maybe I should just call all my stock books which are filled with stamps my "stamp albums" and be done with it! Now there's an idea.
This is a little off the subject of the Scott Worldwide or Classic catalogue, but relevant to it because at one time stamp collecting was worldwide for nearly all collectors, and I suspect that many of us who collect worldwide stamps do so at least partly because it reminds us of our youth, as Bob suggest. So maybe there is a little "nostalgia" that helps drive use of the Classic catalogue? I also think another factor is a growing awareness of the rest of the world's history and culture that makes some collectors (I include myself in this) want to collect not just a few countries, but most of them.
The Scott Classic catalogue is a great help -- although I wish it's ending point was later than 1940. I've never quite understood the logic of using that year. I know it's the final year before WWII, and the final year of Vol I of the Scott International Album, so that makes some sense. But I'd include the war years and their immediate aftermath as part of the "classic era" of stamps, perhaps up to 1950. The downside is that would add a huge number of stamps. At least up to that point was generally before the Great Flood of stamp issues which began mostly in the 1950s-1960s era and has yet to abate.
I will admit that a Scott Classic II catalog that covered from 1941 to 1970 would be a nice addition as it includes so much of early modern history plus it would dovetail nicely with the Stanley Gibbons Stamps of the World catalog. The problem is it requires Parts II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII of the International pages as an album in addition to the Part I which is overwhelming.
It might be nice to have a new version of the Scott Big Blue album that covered up through the end of 1951 with some reasonable additions to the earlier content items perhaps eliminating watermark and perf variations and concentrating on face and major color difference designs. And, perhaps, separated by continent into albums to make them less difficult for handling.
Good point, but I'm not bothered by the need for Volumes II, etc. In fact, my Scott International is in many volumes already as my plan is to collect up to 1975! That's Volumes 1-10 or is it 11 or 12? Can't remember? Oh, sorry, Roman numerals: I-X.
I have no idea if I can come anywhere even close to filling most of the pages from 1840-1975, though. I did this because the cut-off date of 1940 was just too early, in my opinion, and for me the "classic" era of stamps continued at least through the 1940s. I go all the way to 1975 mainly because I wanted to include the era when I first collected stamps, and that was the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s. So 1975 seemed like the logical cut-off point.
It may be a bit overly ambitious, but it's just a hobby so I don't worry about it. When I'm gone, my heirs will probably sell the whole collection for a few hundred dollars (mistakenly, of course). But that won't hurt me in any way -- just them! And I don't think about that. I'm only concerned about having spaces for stamps I buy. Some countries, in fact, I collect beyond 1975 by buying used Bib Blue pages on Ebay, adding blank pages, or collecting those countries in Scott Specialty albums which I already do for a number of countries. I really have too many albums already!
Since I use multiple "volumes" of the Big Blue, I've rearranged all my pages so my albums are alphabetical. Lots of work over many days. But I wonder if regional albums wouldn't be better, for example a volume or two for France and its former colonies, another few volumes for Britain, then Germany, and so on? I'll have to think about that. As for European albums, I'm a little surprised that with all the effort in recent decades to integrate a unified Europe, there isn't even one All Europe stamp album. That seems a little strange to me. An entire world album would be hard to create from scratch -- but Europeans (and others) are certainly welcome to use the Big Blue album! Or the Minkus Global, for that matter.
@Drew
I'm a little surprised that with all the effort in recent decades to integrate a unified Europe, there isn't even one All Europe stamp album. That seems a little strange to me.
I think this can be explained by the motives we Europeans have for integration. It is not so much interest to other nations/cultures (though that too can be fun and useful), but the fact that people (and goods) can now easily move from one country to another within the EU-zone. These days you can move throughout Europe quickly and easily without bureaucracy, 30-40 years back just moving from country to another took several hours on worst scenarios.
I can understand the border crossing issues and the advantages of the EU-zone for people and goods. Just crossing into and back from Canada here in the USA can be a major time issue unless you do it a lot and get special identification to ease the process. It can take 1-2 hours especially to come back from Canada to the USA while going the other way is typically 15 minutes or less.
Much of my interest in collecting world wide is the motivation it brings to learn more about other nations and cultures. The availability of DVD collections of books from stamp collecting's first hundred years which have been scanned to PDF documents has also helped me with a sense of history of countries as well as stamp collecting itself.
I find it so interesting how a topic initially focused on the new Scott Classic Catalog morphs into discussions on storage options ("paper or plastic") to border crossings and the advantage of the EU-zone.
Not complaining, just think it is interesting :-)
Back to the catalog issue, it has some nice additions with new pictures/illustrations, but I have also noticed some decreases in CV for some (many?) items, which as Jim said, is jarring.
Chris
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