Our hobby is over 160 years old, and for most of that time philatelists have been complaining about three things that have made their hobby problematic: access to material that they need, prices, and fear of adding altered or counterfeit material to their collections. In philately today, the good news is that these long time concerns have been largely ameliorated thanks to the internet and the collecting market as it exists today.
The first and most significant problem that collectors of previous generations complained about was the difficulty of finding material for their collections, especially if they collected outside the main stream. Years ago, there was a collector who specialized in covers and stamps relating to gold mining. He spent his life in the search