Scott Catalog Mangles Machins

Machins are hard. 

That's a self-evident statement to anyone reading this blog. As collectors, we have some leeway in dealing with difficulty. We can choose to ignore some Machin varieties and restrict our collection. We can take our time, and we can change our minds without affecting others.

Catalog editors don't have such freedoms. They operate under many competing constraints, and sometimes these constraints bite them. That's apparently what happened to Scott, but before I get to them, I want to look at the plight of catalog editors in general. 

First, there are the specialized catalogs, the Machin Collectors Club and the Deegam Handbook. (Yes, I know the Deegam is not really a catalog, but it is similar enough for this discussion.) The editors of these works have some advantages - they focus on the Machins (and other modern definitives) and are unencumbered by listing practices that evolved in the Victorian era. They are personally very knowledgable.

Yet they still have constraints, including economics and timing. They still have many decisions to make. However, I think it's fair to say that in both these cases, the catalogs are at least in part a labor of love, and that mitigates the problems for them. 

Then there's the special case of Stanley Gibbons. Having staked their claim as publishers of a specialized GB catalog, they now have to deal with complexity far beyond what was originally envisaged. Their successes and lapses are well-known to us, and I give them credit for soldiering on in the face of their own corporate turmoil as well as Royal Mail's.

And that brings us to Scott (here and here). They have perhaps the most difficult position of the English language publishers. They cater to the general collector in the United States and try to find an acceptable level of detail for their foreign listings. They are not specialists in British stamps yet they have to deal with modern complexities.

They've made some interesting decisions along the way. Although they list phosphor varieties for the Wildings and 1960's commemoratives, when either the stamp has a phosphor overprint or doesn't, they ignore phosphor on the Machins (with one exception). They (like the Gibbons intermediate catalog, the Great Britain Concise Catalogue) broke the Machins out into a separate section (again with some exceptions).

One characteristic they chose not to ignore for the Machins is the printing method, and this is what tripped them up recently. Of course, back in "the good old days" it was pretty easy to distinguish between engraving (recess-printing), typography (surface-printing), and photogravure. As recently as 1980, it was easy to differentiate Machins printed by lithography and photogravure.

Then came digital gravure and enhanced lithography, and now the two appear nearly identical.

Scott has another problem not entirely of its own making. As a US-centric company, they do not have any specialists in foreign stamps on their staff. They rely in part on the information they get from the postal administrations. This is a problem when it comes to Royal Mail, as we know and is well documented by Ian Billings on his blog. Another source of information is dealers, who in turn rely for the most part on postal administrations.

I was alerted to the recent mishap by US specialist dealer JET Stamps. JET, which is the team of John and Tina Carlson, has been specializing in Machins for decades and certainly know their way around them. They are multi-lingual (they speak Scott, Gibbons, Deegam and others), and not surprisingly a lot of their customers go by Scott.

They recently pointed out to their customers that some Scott catalog updates published in recent editions of Linn's Stamp News are incorrect. 

Basically, in their listings for the 50th Anniversary of the Machins issues, Scott listed some stamps as printed by lithography, although they were really printed by gravure (which Scott still calls "photo"), and vice versa. This makes a big difference for their assignments of major and minor numbers.

There are also errors and omissions in the listings of several other recent issues. Scott publishes a Machin album to go with their listings, and this, too, has errors.

After communication with JET and others, Scott published some corrections in Linn's August 20, 2018 issue. Unfortunately, it was too late to make the corrections in the 2019 catalog, so collectors who don't see Linn's won't know of the problems unless they find out some other way.

It's a sad state of affairs, but I hope that Scott has learned a lesson and will be more careful with its GB listings in the future.

--Larry