White's Encyclopedia Of The Colors Of US Postage Stamps

Looks like a great reference!





So I bid $128. The set went for $610.

Sounds like when I bid on Guatemala..i better slow down and give Mr. Tibbitts a chance to catch up on posts !!

G'Day Tom and what an asset to your collecting these books should be ,does show all of the variation in color and print of the 47 to 51 I see very handy mate

Those books are the best reference for colour identification of early United states stamps.

David

They sure would be handy. I often struggle to identify varieties in colors.

Dianne

Looking for a set, if anyone knows of an availability...

These have gone out of print decades ago but do come up from time to time in sales from main line auction companies. They are usually listed as a lot in a "Supplies and Literature" section and may be part of a lot containing other reference works. When sold by themselves I believe (from memory) they tend to hammer in the $300-$500 range. A tremendous resource in my opinion.

Also, be sure you get the whole set as I have seen part sets for sale in these auctions. For example, lot 607 in the current Kelleher sale is a literature lot that contains Volumes I and II of this but evidently not Volumes III and IV.

Almost forgot, these are also sometimes available new at pbbooks.com.

An excellent reference book. I have Volume 1-4, plus the gums and paper book. If you find it at the right price, you should get the set.

I don't understand how these books can hold such a high value, inks are not stable over time. How would a out-of-print color standard books hold value over many years?

Color chips standards (like Pantone), even ones made out of coated metal or plastic, have a shelf life of less than 10 years or so. (I once got dinged in an ISO inspection when our color chip standards were out of date by a few months in a production environment.) Even worse is that if the books are used, you have no idea if the previous user might have left a book open for a few weeks on his desk. A book buyer would not even know which page would be affected, talk about buying a pig in the poke.

No ink, even incredibly expensive ones made with high percentages of pure pigments are immune from changing over time. It's chemistry.

Think of a piece of metal, any metal. If you let it sit for years would it change colors? Of course it would... brass, iron, copper, stainless... they will all change because of molecular chemistry. Ink is no different, chemical changes occur over time.
Don

As long as there specialist stamp collectors, color (expertisers, references, etc.) will continue to cause debate.

Printed references are worse than many stamps because the offset-printed samples are printed in such thin layers.

See the following website for more information: http://analyticalphilately.org/

Thanks jogil. Interesting reading. Especially the 2015 and 2017 synopses.

I am searching quite long for this book(s) now and they are obviously rare. I also searched for the editor / publishing house to contact it, and it appears that it doesn't exist anymore. So I don't think there won't be a new edition some day. That's really too bad for all those US classic collectors looking for some color help. I read some reviews of the book by experts and they all agreed it was good.

I found some threads here at SCF about colors of the 3 cents 1861 in White's book:
http://goscf.com/t/44769&whichpage=4#429940
http://goscf.com/t/15508#139901

I know that scans and showing them on monitors is never correct, but those scans of White's book already helped me a lot. Also interesting this one for the 10c brown-yellow:
http://goscf.com/t/36808

For me, and probably many others, the colors of the 3 cents 1851 and 3 cents 1861 as well as 1 cent 1861 and 24 cents 1861 are most difficult. So I ask myself if it could be appropriate to open a general thread about colors where anyone who wants :) could upload scans of those "few" pages from White's book (or continue just in this thread here). I know there is also some question about rights of use, but as shown above, some (and maybe more) pages of the book are already shown at SCF, and there won't be any new edition anyway.

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Of course the best way would be if someone who knows the owner of the rights of use would ask him or her if it could be possible to make scans of the most interesting pages and publish them e.g. on stampsmarter or here. But I think this will be difficult.

All of the works by Roy White (the author) were privately published by him and he died several years ago. I am not sure if his wife is still alive. Obviously, his rights to this work would have been part of his estate. I doubt that it will ever be reprinted due to the difficulties in getting the color accurate. The best use of this work is showing the relative differences in the shades.