Stamp Colour ID Keys: Gibbons & Others

Many collectors use some form of colour key to help identify stamp colours and shades. One such accessory is the Stanley Gibbons Colour Key; a booklet of colour swatches hinged at one end that fans out:




I bought one of these many years ago which is now somewhere in a drawer. To be honest, I found it to be as much use as teats on a boar.

Perhaps it could be useful for more modern issues (or choosing wall paint colours); but for classic era stamps it is sadly lacking. In fact, for those thinking about buying one, they should consider this statement printed in the colour key's foreword:


The problem is, this 'factoid' is not visible to the customer, as it is under the front cover all wrapped up in cellophane. Had I known all this, I wouldn't have bought the damn thing.

To help illustrate the main problem with its use, here is an image that I copied from an eBay listing a few years ago:





The seller had used the colour key to represent the colour of the stamp that he was listing. In this particular instance, that stamp is one from an issue that causes many collectors a lot of difficulty trying to identify. The difference in price of mint copies varies wildly between the shades; £55 to £250.

So, although I thought the seller's intentions were admirable, the problem was it was completely wrong; which I think is rather obvious (well to me it is). But the point is, that comparing stamps that comprise coloured (engraved) lines interspersed with white space, with a solid block of colour on a colour key isn't going to work too well. Not all stamps have a convenient block of colour in them.

The human eye tends to average the colours it sees when confronted with extremes e.g. red and white. This I suppose is very similar to a camera's light metering system, which averages the light entering the lens and adjusts the exposure setting accordingly. So we really need to compare like with like.

This all leads me to the main purpose of this thread. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ORIGINAL STANLEY GIBBONS COLOUR GUIDE?

That fan type version that we can still obtain is not the first ever produced. Here is one which some collectors might be familiar with; the Stanley Gibbons' COLOUR GUIDE for Stamp Collectors:






Now even this isn't the first version; which is apparent from the preamble inside the guide. This particular 'improved edition' however, was a joint venture between SG and printers Perkins, Bacon & Co., Ltd.

Based on colours chosen by Stanley Gibbons, the printers created a series of perforated and gummed labels, using the same stamp production printing techniques mastered over many years. It was priced at 2 shillings and sixpence, which was quite a sum in those days (probably 1930's for this edition). The cost no doubt reflected the manual effort required to 'lick and stick' one hundred labels on the concertina style, four leaf (panel) cardboard guide.

To reproduce a colour guide with stamp labels in this day and age would of course be prohibitively expensive. But; with modern printing methods I don't really see why a  21st Century version could not be done.

The Guide labels:

The labels themselves have both solid colours on the borders and typical engraved lines in the vignette. So the visual effect is very similar to that of viewing 'classic' stamps.

The arrangement of the labels is perhaps a little odd: These progress through the colour spectrum (?) from left to right for the first row, across all four panels. Each label is individually numbered 1 to 20, and colour named.

The next row then reverses direction from right to left; numbered 21 to 40. And so on for the next 3 rows.

I was so impressed with this Colour Guide, that I tried to work out a way of representing it in a way that was viewable to a fairly good standard on a PC. The difficulty was handling the four continuous panels plus the unusual layout of the labels.

So as a little project, I scanned in all sections of the guide; cleaned and tidied up the toning and wrinkling; split the labels into 'colour' types and reassembled them into a four page vertical format.

A minor niggle is that some rows of labels are numbered in reverse; but I wasn't prepared to take apart individual rows of labels just to get everything in exact numerical sequence.

Perhaps this may be of use to someone wanting a quick 'ball-park' identification. But obviously it is limited to 100 colour/shades and will not have some of the very bizarre colour representations that are sometimes found; such as pigeon blood red, or coquelicot, or amaranth red.

So in the following posts are the results, starting with the guide's preamble and introduction, which I have had to enhance for readability :