Why Does Scott Not Give Color Shades Minor Catalog Status?

I am laying out my page templates for my pre-1900 USA album (using Vario stocksheets) and the odd thing about this period is that many of the color varieties list in the Specialized US catalog (mine is a 2009 edition) are only listed but not given lower-case letter status in most cases.

So for example, Scott #179 (the 1875 Zachary Taylor) is listed as blue as main number, but then has 4 different shades listed after : dark blue, bright blue, light blue and greenish blue. But none of these varieties have a minor letter staus. The first three shade varieties have the same cat val as the base stamp, but the greenish blue has a higher cat val.

In my excel file template I use as a key to my albums, I am noting the color shades so they have spaces, but it just strikes me odd that they do not have minor catalog status. I'm not an expert on Classical USA, so would love to understand the reason they do not and/or should not be given a full catalog minor number.

I think that your question contains your answer.

Every time that Scott bestows a catalog number - even a lower case letter for a minor color variation - they make another stamp collectible by the Completionists.

That means that all of the 'comprehensive' albums go out-of-date, pages need to be redesigned, stamps need to be re-hinged, etc.

These are *not* consequences that any catalog publisher should take lightly.

Color variations in very old stamps are reminiscent of the 'missing link' 'problem' in archeology.

Every time that you find an intermediary fossil, you create two new missing links.

This is a self-perpetuating problem, for which we might well have invented the term 'victim of your own success'.

Thought Experiment: imagine if people used missing color variations to claim that stamps were never printed by machine?

So you have bluish, and you have greenish. You now declare blue-green. How long before you assign a catalog letter to blue-blue-green and blue-green-green?

In the past, it was very difficult to sort-out color variations that resulted from the use of inks of slightly different formulations versus color variations that resulted from slightly different conditions of storage (exposure to light, to atmospheric gases, etc).

Analytic chemistry (Abby Sciuto's Major Mass Spec, et al) is getting us to the point where we can distinguish between varieties of ink (eg deserve catalog distinction) and varieties of aging (eg do not deserve catalog distinction).

Sadly, this comes just as there are fewer & fewer people who care.

There's an Isaac Asimov story (or two) in there about developing the technology to solve problems that we no longer care about, or the last philatelist cataloging the last variety.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

ikeyPikey's response is, as always, highly entertaining and thought-provoking, but I would venture to say that the REAL reason is found in the catalog introduction - sure enough - in the 2015 Scott Specialized on page 15A is the reason..............

there may be a little more info in the specialized catalog too?

In fairness to the original questioner and those who do not have the 2015 Specialized, page 15A in the catalog intro contains the "Catalogue Listing Policy" which appears to be boilerplate used in earlier editions and probably with little if any revision. But I have been over that page and the original question about policy regarding the listing of color shades is not covered on that page. In fact the topic of color nomenclature, shade categorization and listing are not discussed at all in the entire introduction. Chances are you would have to contact the current editor, Chad Snee, for a response to this question that would be in any sense of the word "authoritative." Whether he would give you a full and honest answer or even entertain the question at all is anybody's guess.

The standard answer is that "it is beyond the scope of this catalog". The fact is that they really don't need minor numbers. What would be the point? Pretty much every classic stamp ever issued has shade varieties. Most were not intentional anyway, and it would add hundreds of actual number listings to the catalog.
Consider yourself fortunate that they actually list many of the shades in the classic area. In some areas, like first issue revenues, the catalog does not even list 99% of the shades out there, despite a list going back to 1898. Of course the classics have always received the lions share of the attention over the years.

Back in the day, it was very hard for them to reproduce a color shade, so each time they got a new batch of ink in it tended to be different from the last batch - sometimes off just a little, sometimes off a lot.

If you like to collect different shades (I do), go for it, don't let the lack of a minor letter stop you.

I don't know......maybe my 2015 Specialized is different, but I find the following information starting at the bottom paragraph of the left column; "At least a minor number (a small letter suffix) is assigned if there is a distinct difference in stamp shade, noticibly redrawn design, or a significantly different perforation measurement". Now it seems to me that the first part of that sentence specifically tells us when a minor number may be assigned for a color shade. No?

So understanding that policy, it becomes easy to understand why several different minor shades of a blue stamp (such as the original poster's 5c 1875-79 stamp) would not be eligible for a minor number, but something such as the major shade differences (for example) of the 24c 1861 ARE eligible because the colors changed from Violet (the first color issued in 1861 (even though not the first listed in the catalog (but that's a story for a different thread.....), pale gray violet, to steel blue, to red lilac, to brown lilac (if I remember the sequence correctly). Therefore there are assigned 70, 70a, 70b, 70c and 70d.

I also agree with "revcollector's" post completely. The catalog was never intended to list everything that exists, including minor color shades, different color cancels, different postmarks or auxilary markings, etc and any attempt by the editors to try to publish a "complete" catalog would fail because it would weigh 25 pounds! About the best we can hope for (but don't always get....) is a catalog that is consistent in the way it lists things.

I must be going blind. Oh well, some responses are elegant; some are not.

[Don't mind me, I'm just p-o'd that I got outbid on several lots I was after, one of which I really wanted.]

But I think we digress, for as I read the point the questioner originally posed, he did not ask why the cat doesn't list everything, but rather why some listings on color get different treatment than others. Sometimes a color is merely mentioned, sometimes it gets a letter, and sometimes it is the basis for an entirely different major listing. In each case the price may be the same as all others or different.

And the systematic rationale for that is.....?

That is basically my point essayk, just to me it seems odd that Scott does not give minor listings to many of the color shades, especially when that specific color shade had a premium over the base stamp (such as the Greenish Blue shade of Scott #179).

On the practical side however I can see a reason for Scott to not start assigning small letter catalog listings for all the shades, it would approximately double the number of stamps from the pre-1940 era that collectors could collect (and dealers price) as full varieties to collect. Especially considering that shade differentiation can be very subjective, it could open a can of philatelic worms between dealers and collectors and among collectors to determine if a stamp is blue or deep blue or dark blue, for example.

Shade differentiation need not be subjective any longer, as electro-optics has progressed to the point that a few hundred bucks worth of camera & computer, with a one-time development cost of a few thousand dollars, can yield a nice histogram describing the prevalence of every shade in every stamp, graduated in nm (nanometers). A little more development, and you could eliminate most of the effects of cancellations, distinguish design from vignette, etc.

(For the innocent, the wavelengths of visible light run from roughly 400nm to 750nm. To put a single number on something that should not be described with a single number, you can think of the histogrammed wavelength of blue as centered about 475nm, green as 510nm, red as 650nm. Of course, the really innocent don't know from 'wavelength', but that's another thread.)

More importantly, we have well-developed mathematical tools for describing the shapes of the peaks in histograms, with acronyms that (channeling my Inner Sesame Streeter) include the letters F, W, H, and M.

So the problem is not the differentiation, but the difference.

The most valuable way to support a decision to assign a minor letter would be value (eg at public auction). You would need a *lot* of price data for *each* stamp, as the dataset must be large enough to allow you to sort-out the impact of color shading from the impact of plate position, centering, cancellation, date (of sale), etc.

The delicious contradiction is that there might actually *be* enough auction data to do that for the stamps that are hardly worth the effort, but that there may not be enough historic price/etc data to do that for the stamps for which it would be worthwhile.

Failing all that, the catalog publishers will (if we are lucky) rely on the opinions of folks in the business who, in turn, can offer an opinion as to whether/not a particular color deviation is worth a minor letter.

We could, of course, try to establish objective standards, like the center of the FWHM of the shade must be at least one FWHM from the FWHM of the dominant variety. So if the color of dominant variety is centered at 645nm, with an FWHM of its histogram being 35nm, a shade would be declared if its histogram were centered at 610nm or 680nm.

That may sound like a ridiculous amount of science to bring to color shades, but if we are going to value Original Gum ... ;)

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

That is absolutely correct. In fact, I am responsible for a minor color shade listing under the 3c 1861 (Scott #65) stamp for "deep pinkish rose". I actually recommended "pinkish rose" to tbe editors and for reasons unknown to me, they changed it to "deep". Pinkish rose is a shade that has a pinkish cast to the color yet not enough true "pink" or "rose pink" to classify it as one of those. When I showed the editors some examples, they agreed.

Excellent question. And as near as I can tell after working with the Editors for at least 25+ years is there is none! Well, there is sometimes. For example, when I asked them why #70 (red lilac) is listed before the other (earlier) shades, they said that is because the red lilac shade is the most common of the shades and so it would be the primary color in albums, etc. So when I asked why that same logic isn't used for the 3c 1861 where the rose pink is more common than the pink, yet the pink is the major number, then the answer was that it is too late in the game to be changing major numbers, so they would not do so. So that demonstrates the inconsistancies that exist in the catalog, but by and large I think they do a teriffic job with a difficult project.

"as electro-optics has progressed to the point that a few hundred bucks worth of camera & computer, with a one-time development cost of a few thousand dollars, can yield a nice histogram describing the prevalence of every shade in every stamp, graduated in nm (nanometers). A little more development, and you could eliminate most of the effects of cancellations, distinguish design from vignette, etc."

Eliminating the effects of the cancel and color of the paper etc. is far less trivial that you suggest. And if you want to compare your resuts to those of someone else's system, both systems would need to be properly calibrated.

"For the innocent, the wavelengths of visible light run from roughly 400nm to 750nm"

Actually it is only out to about 700nm and even the upper 600's are hard to see.