There are three factors that make a fine philatelist and a fine stamp collection. They are the same factors that the first collectors dealt with, and the Modern period has allowed collectors to face these issues in a new way. The first factor is access to material. From the first, philatelic material was widely diffused. Collectors in one country in 1890 had a hard enough time finding material from their own nation, let alone stamps and covers from different countries. From the first, collectors and dealers maintained extensive international communication to obtain the material that they needed. Many serious philatelists planned their vacations around visits to philatelic hubs, and most of the finest collections from even as late as twenty years ago were made by people whose travels landed them in smaller stamp shops around the world. A client of ours, now in his nineties, once confided that the best part of his international engineering job was that his constant worldwide travels enabled him to visit over a hundred stamp shops worldwide every year and that his collection of internationally used postal cards was only as great as it was because of this. He never would have had access to the scarcest material otherwise.
Knowledge is another of the great limiting factors hindering philatelists. The general catalogs are fine as far as they go, but they don't go very far, especially for more esoteric specialized knowledge. Until 1950, there were few really good philatelic libraries. And, as most philatelic publishing is in periodicals and monographs, the lack of decent philatelic indexing has always presented a real problem. Many of the more specialized articles written over the century and a half of our hobby's intellectual aspirations have merely reiterated work that was done before, usually because the new authors were unaware of the earlier work that had been done. Further, even with good libraries, real philatelic knowledge is only acquired by working on, seeing and handling stamps. Quantities of specialty material were very difficult to find in one place. Traditionally, far harder than creating a fine stamp collection was the fact that it was far more difficult to gain the knowledge that you needed to do so.
The final factor that has always presented a problem with making fine stamp collections is the matter of expense. Good stamps cost money, and rare stamps often cost large amounts of money. Many collectors have the will but lack the way towards having the kinds of collections that they wish to have. And even for people with great wealth, factors such as family goals and the idea that, after all, it is just a stamp, limit the amount that most people are willing to spend on philatelic material.
My thesis is that the current period of time