Cover collecting did not begin at the same time as did stamp collecting. Philately had its start in earnest about 1860, and, really, until about 1910, cover collecting was something collectors did when they didn’t have the time to wash the stamps they needed for their collections off the envelopes on which they had bought them (this is why so many earlier stamps are so much rarer on cover than off). In a few cases, such as Pony Express covers or Civil War Patriotics, much of the collecting interest had to do with the cachet on the envelope and the usage that the cover received (rather than the stamp) so that there were a few early cover savers. But serious postal history collecting had to wait until the efforts of Henry Gibson, Sr. Gibson was the first collector who looked for rare usages of stamps on covers and assembled a major collection that was sold in the early part of the twentieth century. It was his financial success as a cover collector that began the impetus for the second great wave of cover collecting that began about 1930.