I've been relatively scarce the past several weeks and for that I apologize. Work has been very hectic lately for me, still working 48 hour/week shifts. Also had some family drama, as my mother-in-law first moved in with my partner and I, and then a week later passed away. My mother-in-law was 86 and was in late-stage conditions of Alzheimer's Disease, so while her passing was not completely unexpected, the demands on my free time were taken up for the most of May by preparations to move her in and then the unexpected demands of dealing with my mother-in-law's passing, as my partner was her last surviving child.
June has only been a continuation of the stresses of May at work, though I finally took my first week of vacation the week of the 19th to the 25th. It was my first vacation in nine months, and had been originally scheduled for April but due to my hospitalization in April due to a blood infection, I had to reschedule the vacation week. I have another week of vacation in July, but as I have friends from overseas coming to visit and plans to spend a few days in the St Lawrence Valley and then in Montreal and Ottawa, I had to spend a good bit of my June vacation preparing for that. At least I can say life is not dull, but free time to spend with stamps and my other hobbies has been at a premium.
The good news is that July is looking less hectic to a degree. After months of being short staffed, my department at work is now full staffed as of this week. Once we get past the 4th of July holiday, I should be working 40 hour weeks going forward. You do not realize how much an extra day away from work can help keep you sane and give you personal time to do things you want to do! My friends from overseas will be here most of the last two weeks of July so that will be a demand on my free time, but after that I should finally be able to have more time to work on stamps and my other hobbies.
This is not to say I have completely ignored stamps over the past couple months. I was not able to attend World Stamp Expo in New York as it was held during the Memorial Day holiday, one of the busiest holidays for meat and seafood departments, and with the weather having been so nice this year it was really busy and gives me pause to think how busy the 4th July holiday will be especially if the weather is as gorgeous and warm as it has been here the last couple weeks.
I was able however to get a chance to attend COLOPEX 16 here in Columbus. The regional APS show held each year by the Columbus Philatelic Community, it was a nice show. Not quite the grand show it used to be in the 1990s to be sure, but nice enough as it was with some great exhibits and about 25 dealers in the bourse accompanying the show. Found some nice French colonial material that day, and overall it was a great afternoon of philatelic fun for me. In 2018 the annual APS Stamp Show will be held here in Columbus, so that will be something the local philatelic community will be gearing up to host. If it is as good as previous APS shows held here in Columbus it will be a great philatelic time to be had by all.
Now that things in Real Life are beginning to allow me more free time, I am going to start a new series of posts here in this blog over this next several weeks. The idea of the posts was suggested to my by philatelic blog master Jim of the Big Blue blog. As those who regularly read my ramblings here on this blog, I have a love of specialized catalogues, and my library continues to grow as I add more countries into the mix. In fact I think I am currently focusing more on the catalogues than on stamps themselves, in part because I am setting up my collections and so need to have the catalogues now to properly lay out my pages for all the varieties that specialist catalogues provide information. Jim suggested that I consider a series of posts reviewing the various catalogues in my collection and compare them to the Scott Specialized 1840-1940 catalogue that many collectors use when they want access to a bit more information on specialized material from the golden age of philately.
Sounded like a winner to me, so the plan I am working on is to start posting the series one country/catalogue at a time. Hopefully the readers of this blog will find these review useful and, as always contribute suggestions for improvement. And a special thank you to Jim for the excellent idea he planted in my ear. I can only hope my postings are remotely as educational as his posts for BigBlue, though I will be covering the whole catalogues I review which means there will be quite a bit of post-1940 discussion as well.
And speaking of Specialized Catalogues, with the sudden approximately 10% drop in the value of the UK£ against the US$ in wake of the Leave victory in the EU referendum, British catalogues are now a nice bit cheaper than they were a week ago. Since I think this drop in value is only somewhat temporary, I decided to place an order for a bunch of Commonwealth Specialized catalogues from Stanley Gibbons. The fact that SG is also still facing a great deal of its own financial turmoil (its stock is now down to approx UK£0.12 per share now) and the potential that something bad may happen to SG in the near future as a company also motivated my decision. The result - I have 13 catalogues heading my way from Britain and hopefully they will be here sometime in the next week.
If you are in the USA and collect British and or Commonwealth material, now is an excellent time to pick up some items from British retailers while the UK£ readjusts in valuation to deal with the new realities of the UK leaving the EU. Make hay while the sun shines!
Showing posts with label Scott Catalogues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scott Catalogues. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Friday, April 29, 2016
The great debate....hinged vs never hinged...and the evil legacy of Crystal Mounts....(Repost)
This is a reposting of a blog entry from the first version of this blog posted on 1 August 2015
It's a debate that has rumbled through philatelic circles since at least the 1950s (famous US Stamp Dealer and author Herman Herst Jr wrote about it in many of his articles, collections of which have been published as Nassau Street and Fun And Profit In Stamp Collecting and both of which are entertaining and educational reads well worth checking out!). Should mint stamps be collected as hinged or never hinged. Or perhaps more to the point, at what point chronologically should a collector stop collecting mint hinged stamps and only seek out never hinged copies of issues.
A look at stamp catalogues from various regions is little help as none seem to agree to any date in particular. Generally, Scott sets its values for mint as never hinged for most nations around 1945 or so. Some countries a little later, some (like the USA) in the 1930s. Scott also, at least in its Classic Specialized 1840-1940 Catalog, provides pricing for never hinged for issues before their cutoff date. One thing Scott very rarely does though is price items, or even give a rough guide to value, for hinged items AFTER the transition date. Does this mean hinged items issued after the transition date are worthless???? Surely it can't, but how do you value the items if there is no guide, even a rough one.
Other catalogues, as I note above, use different dates. The Gibbons catalogs make the transition form hinged to never hinged with the coronation of George VI in 1937. Again, no guide is provided as to what kind of a discount should be given for items issued after 1937 that are hinged, and even more perplexing, neither is any suggestion of a degree of premium never hinged items issues before 1937. At least none is given in the three specialized Gibbons catalogues I own (Australia 9th ed, New Zealand 5th ed and Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei 4th ed).
Since I am focusing at this time mainly on the French colonial world, I also have a set of Maury catalogues for France and empire. Here there IS some help, as Maury prices everything from start to its general transition date of 1960 in both never hinged and hinged varieties. Interestingly enough, the degree of premium for Never Hinged items in the later 1950s vs hinged is not that large, usually around 33% or so. After 1960 prices for mint stamps are for never hinged only, though one could argue that the discount should not be too huge for hinged if the examples of the late 1950s pricing ratios are taken into consideration. Similarly the Afinsa catalogues for Portugal and Colonies offer pricing for both never hinged and hinged stamps up to 1953 and the Centenary of Portuguese Stamps issue. The İsfila catalogue for the Ottoman Empire and Turkey sets the date at 1938, while the Guillermo Jalil catalogue for Argentina sets it at 1940, with both catalogues providing pricing guidance for never-hinged items issues before their transition dates, though not after.
Stamp mounts only began to become common in the USA with the introduction of the Crystal Mount by the HE Harris company in the 1950s, though there were some predecessors that, to be honest, were more work than worth the effort to use. I remember Crystal Mounts well, since that is what my father used when he introduced me to stamp collecting in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember spending many an snowy upstate NY evening helping him mount his various collections with these mounts, that only came in a small range of sizes so that one had to fold over part of the mount to secure the stamp inside.
Until the introduction of mounts based around stamp height in a much larger range of sizes (such as the Scott Mount by Prinz and similar mounts) these were considered the best mount for keeping stamps never hinged. And millions of US collectors used them in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s (and some still swear by them)
(rant) I truly LOATHE Crystal Mounts (/rant). It was always way too easy to bend perfs as you folded over the extra plastic, and stamps often have a hard time "breathing" when they are in tightly folded ones. When I inherited my father's stamp collection, I discovered that removing stamps from mounts was rather akin to extracting a coin that has fallen thru a grate - often frustrating and infuriating. You need to be very careful removing the stamps from a Crystal Mount, and you often need to put it under some weight afterward to remove the -curl- that the mounts often create after years of storage. Really poorly stored collections housed in Crystal mounts often have yellow staining where the gummed strip was positioned, and occasionally the gum will even glaze from moisture trapped over time.
When I was heavily building up my first stamp collection in the 1990s, I used the traditional album pages and Scott Mounts, as I've noted in my first post. At times it felt like I was spending as much on supplies as I was on stamps. But this time around I have decided to use Lighthouse Vario stockpages and it is so wonderful NOT to have to factor the cost of mounts into my stamp budget AT ALL. Although they have come down in price from what they were in the 1980s when I was trying to convince my father to switch to Scott mount and stop using Crystal mounts (an arugment he eventually came to accept in the early 1990s) they are still not cheap especially when you consider the range of sizes you need if you are a worldwide collector.
But back to the original question - hinged or never hinged. In the end, this is something that each collector has to decide for himself or herself. De gustibus non disputatum est. My general rule of thumb is hinged is fine until 1960, and from 1960 onward I will only buy never hinged issues. By 1960 you really have huge supplies of never hinged material for most nations available in the marketplace here in the USA, and stamp mounts by 1960 were much more commonly in use. Some nations I may make the never-hinged only transition a bit earlier, but 1960 is, for me, a pretty firm date for all nations. Now, if given the opportunity to purchase pre-1960 material in never hinged form at a fair price, then I will not turn my nose up at it either, but for me at least, there is nothing wrong with a hinged stamp, provided that the hinging by previous owners has not done any major physical damage to the stamp over the years, such as thins on the back. For my part, so long as the stamp remains in my possession, I will not harm it further with another hinge. But let us be honest, we admire our stamps for the designs on the front, not to fetishize the pristine-ness of the gum on the back.
It's a debate that has rumbled through philatelic circles since at least the 1950s (famous US Stamp Dealer and author Herman Herst Jr wrote about it in many of his articles, collections of which have been published as Nassau Street and Fun And Profit In Stamp Collecting and both of which are entertaining and educational reads well worth checking out!). Should mint stamps be collected as hinged or never hinged. Or perhaps more to the point, at what point chronologically should a collector stop collecting mint hinged stamps and only seek out never hinged copies of issues.
A look at stamp catalogues from various regions is little help as none seem to agree to any date in particular. Generally, Scott sets its values for mint as never hinged for most nations around 1945 or so. Some countries a little later, some (like the USA) in the 1930s. Scott also, at least in its Classic Specialized 1840-1940 Catalog, provides pricing for never hinged for issues before their cutoff date. One thing Scott very rarely does though is price items, or even give a rough guide to value, for hinged items AFTER the transition date. Does this mean hinged items issued after the transition date are worthless???? Surely it can't, but how do you value the items if there is no guide, even a rough one.
Other catalogues, as I note above, use different dates. The Gibbons catalogs make the transition form hinged to never hinged with the coronation of George VI in 1937. Again, no guide is provided as to what kind of a discount should be given for items issued after 1937 that are hinged, and even more perplexing, neither is any suggestion of a degree of premium never hinged items issues before 1937. At least none is given in the three specialized Gibbons catalogues I own (Australia 9th ed, New Zealand 5th ed and Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei 4th ed).
Since I am focusing at this time mainly on the French colonial world, I also have a set of Maury catalogues for France and empire. Here there IS some help, as Maury prices everything from start to its general transition date of 1960 in both never hinged and hinged varieties. Interestingly enough, the degree of premium for Never Hinged items in the later 1950s vs hinged is not that large, usually around 33% or so. After 1960 prices for mint stamps are for never hinged only, though one could argue that the discount should not be too huge for hinged if the examples of the late 1950s pricing ratios are taken into consideration. Similarly the Afinsa catalogues for Portugal and Colonies offer pricing for both never hinged and hinged stamps up to 1953 and the Centenary of Portuguese Stamps issue. The İsfila catalogue for the Ottoman Empire and Turkey sets the date at 1938, while the Guillermo Jalil catalogue for Argentina sets it at 1940, with both catalogues providing pricing guidance for never-hinged items issues before their transition dates, though not after.
Stamp mounts only began to become common in the USA with the introduction of the Crystal Mount by the HE Harris company in the 1950s, though there were some predecessors that, to be honest, were more work than worth the effort to use. I remember Crystal Mounts well, since that is what my father used when he introduced me to stamp collecting in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember spending many an snowy upstate NY evening helping him mount his various collections with these mounts, that only came in a small range of sizes so that one had to fold over part of the mount to secure the stamp inside.
Crystal Mounts in their packaging from the 1980s...images that bring shudders of horror to me today.
(rant) I truly LOATHE Crystal Mounts (/rant). It was always way too easy to bend perfs as you folded over the extra plastic, and stamps often have a hard time "breathing" when they are in tightly folded ones. When I inherited my father's stamp collection, I discovered that removing stamps from mounts was rather akin to extracting a coin that has fallen thru a grate - often frustrating and infuriating. You need to be very careful removing the stamps from a Crystal Mount, and you often need to put it under some weight afterward to remove the -curl- that the mounts often create after years of storage. Really poorly stored collections housed in Crystal mounts often have yellow staining where the gummed strip was positioned, and occasionally the gum will even glaze from moisture trapped over time.
When I was heavily building up my first stamp collection in the 1990s, I used the traditional album pages and Scott Mounts, as I've noted in my first post. At times it felt like I was spending as much on supplies as I was on stamps. But this time around I have decided to use Lighthouse Vario stockpages and it is so wonderful NOT to have to factor the cost of mounts into my stamp budget AT ALL. Although they have come down in price from what they were in the 1980s when I was trying to convince my father to switch to Scott mount and stop using Crystal mounts (an arugment he eventually came to accept in the early 1990s) they are still not cheap especially when you consider the range of sizes you need if you are a worldwide collector.
But back to the original question - hinged or never hinged. In the end, this is something that each collector has to decide for himself or herself. De gustibus non disputatum est. My general rule of thumb is hinged is fine until 1960, and from 1960 onward I will only buy never hinged issues. By 1960 you really have huge supplies of never hinged material for most nations available in the marketplace here in the USA, and stamp mounts by 1960 were much more commonly in use. Some nations I may make the never-hinged only transition a bit earlier, but 1960 is, for me, a pretty firm date for all nations. Now, if given the opportunity to purchase pre-1960 material in never hinged form at a fair price, then I will not turn my nose up at it either, but for me at least, there is nothing wrong with a hinged stamp, provided that the hinging by previous owners has not done any major physical damage to the stamp over the years, such as thins on the back. For my part, so long as the stamp remains in my possession, I will not harm it further with another hinge. But let us be honest, we admire our stamps for the designs on the front, not to fetishize the pristine-ness of the gum on the back.
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