The Perspective From Across 'The Pond'*

And therein lies the rub, with catalog being based on... an outlier. The only folks this favors is the community of dealers, expertisers, and auction houses.

It's negative, and exploitative that I wish I knew how to right.

My belief is the cataloging process needs to be open sourced, and fight against catalog numbering being proprietary, publishing and reusing auction results, et al.

I also believe it can be vastly simplified by not pricing stamps under $5, whereby the storage, shipping and handling exceed actual value. They can be documented, but not priced.

My point was that neither the catalog value nor the market value of "ordinary" examples is changed by whatever number those "collectors" are willing to pay for graded stamps. And not pricing something will only have the reverse effect on non collectors. They will immediately assume that whatever they have must be really valuable because it is so rare that no one can put a price on it. Remember, to them it is not about facts, it is about perception. That's why the non collector always assumes that the Fourth Bureau one cent he has is a 596, and never a 552 or 632. And why most do not believe it when told the facts.

Numismatists run to pricing guidelines that are based roughly on retail pricing published by NGC, PCGS, Coin World, and other resources. I am not sure why historically stamp catalog publishers bloat valuations, perhaps someone can shed some light.

As bad as many of us think Scott is, other's have mentioned Gibbons as worse and there are many others worse than Scott's- Michel, Yvert, and Sassone come to find.

I don't think Scott's values are that far out of line when purchased in the condition, grade and setting as described in Scott's introduction, at least for older material. Prices are for sound VF stamps purchased individually from a full service dealer, not for a F/VF copy with a corner crease purchased from a collector on ebay. The great majority of classic material is neither sound nor VF. Stamps meeting those criteria do often sell reasonably close to full CV.

Modern material is a different story as most values are just based on some sort of formula relating to face value, and they are rarely purchased one at a time from a full service dealer. Although dealers may price them close to CV in many cases, many (most?) collectors buy more common issues via more economical methods.