Scott To Sg To Scott Number Conversions

Does anyone know of a conversion chart for converting Scott to SG to Scott numbers? One of my collections is British Empire, pre QEII. Without manually going back and forth between my Scott Catalogs and SG Catalog, it would be nice to see a conversion chart of sorts.

Yes it would. Are you offering to make it?

https://goscf.com/t/6305

https://goscf.com/t/57457

https://goscf.com/t/15876

https://goscf.com/t/49659

https://goscf.com/t/35162&whichpage=1#297147

https://goscf.com/t/86727

https://goscf.com/t/73469

https://goscf.com/t/39576

https://goscf.com/t/58780


Now to summarize the above, your question is common, has been asked for a long time, and the answer is no (with legal reasons presented) but they exist in narrow areas when made by a collector or interested individual dealer and such tends to apply to most any this catalogue conversion to that catalogue.

I built my own for my Ireland collection, including some spaces for Hibernian numbers, by pulling in a listing with SG numbers from a dealer and basically keying in the Scott numbers. This would be quite the undertaking for a worldwide collection, and publishing it would start to run into copyright concerns.

I think this is less useful than you might hope for, and probably shortchanges you, or your collection.

Starting at the beginning, every Penny Black is Sc#1, but it could be SG#1 or SG#3, in addition to most likely being SG#2.

(In my personal opinion) if you already have something correctly identified as SG#3, there is no benefit to now calling it Sc#1. Conversely, if you have something correctly identified as Sc#1, it's worth your while to decide if it is SG#1, 2 or 3 (and then maybe to check plates, if that's your thing). A conversion table doesn't help you with that.

In short, I think having a copy of SG Commonwealth open is the only practical option.

My 2d. [#2 in Scott; 4, 5 or 6 in SG]

(Sorry for not answering your question.)

Indeed. Unless your BE collection is very simplified - and I suspect it isn't - just working from SG would make more sense. I see the problem when it comes to ebay or other sales from US vendors, however.

There are sites on the imformation superhighway that show numbers from various catalogues, but, because of their previous spamming of SCF, they can't be linked here.

I love, love, love buying Commonwealth material from dealers who only use Scott.

There are some nice bargains to be had.

The same goes for European dealers using Yvert for BE stamps, especially when you can identify the watermark from pictures. The Yvert clan just cannot be bothered with it. But be careful they price it as if it is the cheapest watermark.

As for the Michel fetishists (lastDodo) and Spain, they are just hilarious. Michel loves colour varieties but these fetishists still do not understand that literal translation of colours is a stupidity that can cost you dearly.

Because you can't really do that. The desire to have a catalogue-to-catalogue "concordance" like this kind of assumes that each catalogue publisher has the same list of stamps -- but they don't. The Stanly Gib cataloguers, having spent an enormous amount more time than anyone else, searching every flyspeck and curlicue on every single British stamp for oh, about 175 years, are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that there are hundreds more British stamps than the Scott cataloguers believe there are. So one stamp might have many variations in the other catalogue when you look there.

I also collect GB stamps, and I have the Scott catalogue which is not quite ideal for Britain, and I have the SG catalogue which kind of goes overboard in listing so many pretty clearly identical stamps -- well, I think so, anyway. Scott does the same thing for early U.S. stamps since they have had about the same length of time to peruse U.S. stamps to find each tiny difference. This drives me nuts, but for early collectors it was a way to "find" more stamps among those that appeared to be identical, and thus have larger collections and more fun building those collections. Plus dealers love it since they could then sell more stamps.

"Oh, that's a subnumber (a) that is different in this tiny border detail, so it's twice as expensive as the basic stamp without that tiny slip of the engraving tool."
"Uh, okay, if you say so."

I imagine whatever the catalogue is for Paraguay, it does the same thing with many varieties of their stamps. It does get really weird at some point.

You can laboriously make a concordance but it often makes no sense -- so why not just use both catalogues? That's the best approach. My GB collection is maybe a hybrid with most of the basic stamps Scott lists plus varieties in SG that I consider to be actually different stamps, excluding all the silly ones I either don't consider varieties or secretly pretend aren't different because I can't afford them. If I don't agree with it, I am capable of coming up with a plausible excuse, take my word for it. 'Do not be a slave to the catalogue' will be on my gravestone.

Also if you make such a list that compares stamps in two catalogues, you better hand it out for free as profiting from it might get you into some copyright problems with the law. The numbers are the actual product these companies own, as strange as that may sound.

"Sixty-five is our copyright number, dammit," said the catalogue editor.
"Sure, buddy, whatever you say."

But there is a websites that do have a very good concordance/

It's not British but I tried something similar for Russia with Michel and Scott because I was buying a lot from European dealers and they mostly used Michel. What a disaster.

Michel adds lower case letters starting with "a" to the catalog number for color varieties, letters usually starting at "x" for paper varieties, upper case letters starting with "A" for different perforation gauges and Roman numerals for different types (paper, design; this can be very confusing since paper types also have a different lettering system as noted above). Sometimes the variety code letters become headings which makes things exponentially worse. Finally, they can add a letter prefix to the base catalog number if they added a stamp after the original introduction into the catalog.

There is zero way of making this correspond to Scott in any way that doesn't make you want to guzzle cheap wine and smoke camel dung.

If there is anything they do not do for the GB Concise (the primary GB catalogue), it is fly-specking. Even the specialised range only lists major constant varieties and just mentions certain minor ones, Concise hardly lists those.




Concise lists watermark, perforation, printer, colour change, gum, and luminescence varieties. It also lists plates for Victorian issues (mostly just mentioning them) and major shade varieties up to the 1934 photogravure Mackennals. From that point on, they do not even go further than just mentioning the deliberate size differences.

Another problem you may encounter is that Scott and SG use different colour names. When "shade" vareties exist, that can become confusing; e.g., when Scott calls a lilac stamp purple and a purple variety is listed by SG.

I tried a Machin cross reference and it was impossible because they do not list the same attributes. Scott ignores tagging but includes thick/thin characters and EME while SG Concise ignores thick/thin and EME. This means Machins that have left/right/center band variations could have the same Scott number if there was not some other cataloging difference such as print method, perforation, etc. Gibbons also lists printers.

I was once paid to come up with a cross reference between Scott and a specialized Thai catalog and I finally had to throw up my hands and say it was impossible.