Scott Values For Sets Only

I've noticed that Scott Catalogue has an increasing number of
listings where they show the value for the complete set only, not
each stamp separately.I've seen examples for Jordan, North Korea, Viet Nam etc.
That's Ok if you have the whole set but is no help if you only have part of the set.
I haven't seen this in Michel, don't know about SG since I don't
have access to those.
The only reason I can think of why they're doing this is to safe space.
I hope this isn't a new trend.

Yes I noticed they are doing that with some of the West Indies islands also...it makes it difficult to catalog used singles...

I think it kind of defeats the propose of a catalogue. Why bother buying it then ?
Actually I haven't bought any Scott catalogues since the early eighties
when there were only three volumes. I loan out the latest issues
from the library. They just got all the 2011 volumes for reference
only but one can check out the 2009 copies.
I tried to get the old 2007 volumes which the library removed from
the shelves and deactivated (DISCARDED) but somebody beat me to it.

On the other hand, there are so many stamps listed at the $0.20 minimum value.

Since catalog prices include "overhead" for retail and dealers, you could say those stamps have NO value and you're only paying for the dealer's overhead.

Often it seems to me that if I buy the high values in a set (maybe the last 2 or 3), you should give me the low values.

On the third hand, I'd hate to seem them stop listing all the stamps

KirkS

They've done this for the Falkland Islands and Pitcairn Islands as well. It bugs me a bit, but then usually I only buy sets (at least the 'affordable' ones) in any case. As long as they keep including prices for the more costly sets I'll be OK with it.

Swabbie thats probably the smart way to do it..however, I prefer postally used stamps...if I want to trade or sell a stamp from those sets I have to have my wife do the fractions !!

I'm not sure how Scott makes up divines its prices, but I bet there must be an extremely low volume of traffic in many of the modern singles. A lot of the more modern stuff seems to trade as sets almost exclusively, unless sold in packets or kiloware.

I respect the enormity of their ongoing task, but they're getting paid for it, so I reserve the right to gripe occasionally.

Collin thats true..if we buy we have the right to gripe..right now I see no reason to update from my 2008 catalogs...the new catalogs will cost us 60 bucks each any way you look at it...unless a person is a serious part time dealer...why bother ? 98 percent of the stamps I am interested in are pre 2008..i would have to recatalog a heck of a lot of duplicates to justify $360 for 6 catalogs..thats more than half my stamp budget($600-700) per year !

I usually have this issue as well since I began cataloguing my African stamps which also appear to be affected by this issue.

I found a neat trick to deal with this. Say the sets value is $60 and the total stamp number in a set is 6. Divide it by the number of stamps than you could say its $10 dollars for one, and half the price if used, so $5 for used. For those with values like $3.50 for the entire set of 6, I use the same method and get usually $.60 (round up or down) for new and $.30 for used. Its simple I guess.

There are attempts that can be found online, quite probably even here in the archives, to use a formula to calculate individual stamp values based on relative face values of the stamps in question. The goal is to give greater weight to the stamps with higher face values, presuming that there would be fewer of them.

As I understand the concept, if a set has a total face value of 3 zblodniks, the 1-zblodnik stamp should represent one-third of the set's value.

Obviously, an imperfect system, and one which doesn't account for stamps printed in complete sets for sale to dealers (where all numbers should be approximately equal), or sets where the issuer seems to have issued very few of one or two values, in order to drive up prices. And it seems completely unreliable for stamps that actually saw significant postal use.

The only reliable work-around I've found is to concentrate on pre-1940 stamps.

I arrived at that self-same conclusion CJD (though I might fudge on that for better countries). I do collect current issues for Panama though, which lately has been cataloged by Scott only in terms of sets.