Future Scott Catalogues

Hi All

About 6 or 7 months ago, I heard that the Scott's Catalogues will be going to 12 volumes, up from 6 volumes. This is old news; however, I have heard only in the past week that Scott's will no longer give a CV for individual stamps, but only for sets! If this is true, I can't see Scott's staying in the business in the same way they are now.

Many of us in this forum have incomplete sets and duplicates etc., and we use the Scott's more or less as a reference. If they only list CV for sets, I no longer feel that Scott's would be the catalogue of choice for me personally. Their usefulness would be greatly diminished.

Can any of our members confirm, or deny, this latest rumour?

Chimo

Bujutsu

Sounds like a rumor. Pricing by set or series only would be an absolute disaster for any philatelic publisher.

Do you have a source for this?

Scott has been using pricing by series for many modern stamps for quite a few years, mainly for countries that produce excessive stamps.

The data for individually priced stamps is always suspect to me.

@MEMBERS, all the pricing in any Scott Catalog is always close to a year old, so always out of date.

While all prices are out of date, but I suppose Scott prices could be considered functional but not accurate.

The value of all Scott Catalogs are the basic information contained therein!

Stampmaster

The only advantage would be to save on paper by listing CVs as sets versus individuals. I don't see Scott switching over to this method in the future.

More than that, in most cases. The only stamps that Scott updates yearly are big ticket items that are sold at auction. Most of the listings only get reviewed once every few years, even for popular countries. And honestly, that's good enough in most cases. The market just doesn't move that quickly in most cases for most stamps. Plus any changes they do make to catalog value still won't be accurate retail pricing in most cases, anyway.

To Artful's point, most stamps that move heavily in a short period of time are subjects of speculation, so the values may rise or fall. No point really in being "accurate" once a year as it only covers a short period of time for speculative market prices.

Catalogue values are just general recommendations/guidelines anyway, not gospel. Nothing moves THAT far in a single year that the Scott value is going to be radically more off the mark than when published.

For areas with extreme volatility, e.g., China over the last decade, Russia the dacde before, etc., Scott's values are obsolete they day they go to press anyway.

Hi, ok, I have a target around my neck. I wish Scott Catalogs would add more plate varieties pictures (OK here is where you take shots at me), but change back to Black & White images.

Ok, now going into hiding.

Stampmaster

Thanks all for your inputs. To be honest, I could not see Scott's taking this path. I too thought it would be disastrous. I heard this rumour from a friend, who in turn, heard it at his stamp club. I guess the usual way rumours start

Chimo

Bujutsu

Bujutsu - I doubt it is a rumour, they have already started it. Below are two examples from Tuvalu and one from Tokelau. They are from the 2009 catalogue. I do know that the Tuvalu stamps at one time were listed with individual prices, but don't know when the change occurred.

My guess is they will continue to expand on it. However, I doubt they will do it for the more popular countries like Canada, US, UK, etc.

If Scott expands on this practice beyond "islands and sand dunes" their goose is cooked, and they might know it.

This is likely a measure to save space. All of those listings you pictured would add extra inches to the catalog if priced individually, and those inches, spread across multiple listings and countries, would add up to many extra pages. That being said, I find it very annoying when I do run into this issue and I hope Scott doesn't make this more widespread than it already is.

On another note, this is yet another reason why Scott should go electronic - they wouldn't have to worry so much about space and they could picture and value each and every stamp. Of course, even if they went electronic, I can't see them going back and editing these listings and adding more images (unless perhaps they already have them archived somewhere, which I doubt), so I think we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

Hi all

I believe that Scott's have been doing this for a number of years for those countries like the dunes and the Grenadines etc., because they issue(d) so many stamps and their postal validity is doubtful(?) My Scott's set is 2011 and singles are listed in these.

On another note posted in here, going electronic makes sense, to some degree. I have heard of other catalogues being available by this method, but, as far as the consumer is concerned, we don't save anything. Linn's, just to use as an example, isn't much of a savings to get electronically versus their paper version. To be honest, I am not sure how the electronic system works after the expiry date? Are you able to keep the out of date version? You would think that the catalogue publishers would pass along some of the savings to their subscribers by not using the paper versions, but this does not seem to be the case(?), corr4ect me if I'm wrong.

I would like to see what others have experienced on this matter.

Chimo

Bujutsu