Stamp catalogs are MUST HAVE items for all stamp
collectors. A catalog contains information on how to identify,
categorize, and organize your stamps and on determining a "catalog"
valuation for your stamp collection.
For further information on the stamp valuations printed in catalogs, please see the
"Postage Stamp Values - What is Catalog Value"
article in the
Selling Stamps
section of this website.
Catalogs also help in determining the technical aspects of a particular stamp, whether it be a watermark, perforations, printing varieties, color shades, cancellations, on cover premiums, etc., all of which make a big difference in correctly attributing a stamp to being a particular catalog number.
Depending on what your
collecting interest is, there are many different possibilities of which
types of catalog(s) you may require for your collection.
Catalogs are a necessary "requirement" of our hobby, and they have become horrendously expensive. For my website content, my eBay Store, my US stamp collection, and for general worldwide reference, I have to maintain a set of the Scott Postage Stamp Catalogs, published annually, now in fourteen volumes, which retails for about $800 currently. With my specialties, I must maintain relatively current editions of the Michel and Zumstein catalogs. In addition to that there are books on specialty subjects, such as postmarks and plating. I also have Sassone, Gibbons, Yvert-Tellier, and Zagorsky catalogs, for which I do not maintain current editions.
There are other catalogs that are so rare, such as some of the ones on Austrian Imperial postmarks and classical American stamps, that they only exist in advanced philatelic reference libraries. In a few cases, I have been able to borrow some of these, and, using Adobe Acrobat, have scanned them to electronic PDF files. Whatever one's interests are, one of the major expenses any collector / philatelist will incur will be the cost of their "philatelic reference library".
Articles
in this section will be about the various types of catalogs and the
catalog publishers. Whether your interests are in collecting a specific
country or countries, a particular thematic, or possibly the entire
world, your particular needs should be addressed here. New articles
will be added soon. Please follow the links at the upper right
to each article.
The first edition of the Scott Catalogue, published in 1868, is shown above. Those were truly the "golden days of collecting", when just about anyone could almost "complete" the World, for a very small investment.
The following links feature category-focused affiliated seller listings on various eBay sites worldwide. They may enable visitors to shop
for and to buy specific items for the
particular collecting subject they've just read about.
The
affiliated eBay seller auction and store lots provided by eBay,
Inc. are not the responsibility of the management of this
website.
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