Catalogue Reviews

Now that the Gibbons Concise catalogue has arrived, it is time to review that and the latest edition of the Burgess Complete Machin Catalogue.

The cover price of Stanley Gibbons' Great Britain Concise 2022 edition has increased by £2 to £39.95. It has 14 pages more than last year’s, with 12 pages devoted to the additions from Royal Mail’s special stamp programme, and the others covering the datamatrix Machins.

On the latter, the catalogue editors, despite leaving some spaces in the numbers they allocated in GSM to the Stamps issued in April, have already decided to change some.  For some reason the editors no longer take the trouble to help dealers and collectors by highlighting those changes in the Preface, although there is plenty of space to do so. 

One thing editor Vince Cordell does start to address in the Preface is the impact of Royal Mail’s invalidation of certain stamps on catalogue values.  He writes:

“The more difficult issues can only remain sought after, the more common issues whose prices have been propped up by their face values will undoubtedly need some future adjustment.”

This is an important confirmation of something I have thought about for some time.  

From my recent experience of sorting QE2 stamp booklets it is clear that the booklet section could be improved. Eliminating inconsistencies in the listing of changes to covers and contents would mean additional numbers and might mean changing some, but this is not without precedent.

They could also make it easier to identify the contents without constantly having to flick back to the relevant pages in the main listing by providing more illustrations. This is especially true of the Q (Greetings) booklets where not all the panes are even illustrated.

Indeed Gibbons could provide actual illustrations of all the booklet panes instead of the diagrams they use in the Machin section. Whilst these do convey a lot of information, it is surely easier for readers to identify a pane quickly if it is in full colour, rather than black and blue as at present. The phosphor bands could still be added in yellow.

When the internet first attracted hobbyists most of us were still using dial-up connections with low download speeds, and web authors generally provided a lot of text and small, if any, illustrations. Remember, at this time it was possible to set your web browser to load pages without illustrations, such was the saving in cost!  

To some extent I suspect Gibbons are still in this mindset, but in print.  Whilst providing all the essential textual information and illustrations of all the stamps in a set (once at least), other useful illustrations are not considered.

This is where Gary Burgess’s Complete Machin Stamp Catalogue has some advantage. Starting in the 21st century when the whole attitude to information sharing has changed - and printing costs, especially in full colour, are relatively cheap - this catalogue has full colour illustrations of many booklet panes as well as covers. Indeed the 2022 edition now includes all PSB panes not just those with mixed values.  

(Just to clarify, the Burgess catalogue does not picture the Greetings booklet contents either, but then it is a Machin catalogue.)  

Correction: I edited that sentence into my draft from memory: Gary reminds me that the contents of the booklets ARE illustrated in his catalogue - something I suggested to Hugh Jefferies for the Concise some years ago.

This opus is devoted principally to Machins rather than the whole of Great Britain since 1840, and so it’s 320+ A4 pages weight much the same as the Concise, but there is much more ‘white space’ making it easier to read.  

I also like the classification of Post & Go stamp types as A, B, C, D, E, rather than Gibbons’ (John Deering’s) I, II, IIA, III, IIIA, which is more difficult to read in the listings with the sans-serif typeface.

New for this edition are sections on the Open Value P&G labels from self- service kiosks in PO branches, which don’t get anywhere near as much attention from most collectors as the stamps churned out from Royal Mail’s museum machines. Their variety and in some cases scarcity makes the recording of them here all the more important.

Likewise Horizon labels which, whilst not collected as widely even as Post & Go, are an important part of postal history whether collected singly or on cover/piece so another new section in the catalogue is devoted to them. This should certainly assist those collectors who have squirreled away examples and now need to sort them out.

Paradoxically I know some collectors who are trying to obtain any label from every branch, a task magnified by closures, reopening and outreaches. Sensibly those details are not included in this catalogue!

The Complete Machin Stamp Catalogue costs £32.99 softback, and £19.99 as a pdf, plus postage.  It's also available from several stamp dealers who visit fairs.

Nobody should be without the Concise.  But users who want more help in identifying their definitives, without going to the Deegam level of complexity and numbering idiosyncrasies, should get the Burgess catalogue as well.

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