Question About Which Comes First For A New Variety

Should a new variety get a positive expertizing certificate and then get a catalogue listing?

Should a new variety get a catalogue listing and then get a positive expertizing certificate?

If I understand the issue correctly, I would assume that the work of expertizing would precede any thought of putting something new in a catalogue.

I would image the first step is to get acknowledgement from source such as Unitrade, BNAPS..etc.

I have tried but to no avail.

Robert

I have gotten some stuff certified positively for a new variety recently that has been discovered after 80 years. I think that writing an article on it may help with it getting out there.

Ideally, any new philatelic stamp discovery should have some or all of the following:

1) Stamp Expertizing Recognition, Acceptance and Certification (depends on the expertizer),

2) Stamp Society Journal Recognition, Acceptance and Publishing (depends on the editor),

3) Stamp News Recognition, Acceptance and Publishing (depends on the editor and/or column writer),

4) Stamp Dealer Acceptance, Promotion and Selling (depends on the dealer),

5) Stamp Catalogue Recognition, Acceptance and Publishing (depends on the editor).

What is confusing sometimes is what gets the full treatment (1-5) and what doesn't get the full treatment (1-5).

Sometimes legitimate postal issued material gets a backseat when compared to non-postal unissued material.

I think a part of this relies upon the scope of the 'variety'. Major errors, such as the new US Earthscape invert sheet that was recently discovered, always get a lot of attention. Freaks and oddities much less so; if you can see the variety at 5 feet then it probably gets more attention.

Catalog publishers a face a considerable challenges with adding new varieties beyond the task of determining their scope. Cost factors include not only the one-time expense of adding the variety, but the significant additional cost of making the catalog larger and larger. This also potentially increases the cost of the publication to the end users. For these reasons I assume that few catalog publishers are going to want to include endless flyspec varieties.

That said, they might be negatively impacted if they do not list a new variety and are criticized for being incomplete. Ideally catalog publishers would communicate the criteria they use for adding varieties and not leave it undefined.
Don
APS #094826

One of the problems of listing every variety is the size of the task I have books that specialize in just one stamp's varieties that are 100's of pages long and new varieties still being found. If you wish to collect various varieties you really need to look at more specialized books covering the stamps you are interested in. A general catalogue can not possibly list every variety. That is where specialist publications on specific stamps or issues need to be looked at. A general catalogue may include a few of the varieties, but a specialized book will cover far more on any particular stamp and or issue.

Plating position differences and/or varieties can be very vast since every position can be somewhat different from every other position. Some catalogues list unique stamp varieties where there is only one copy and others only list those that are consistently constant.