Philatelists come in many shapes and shades. They have many interests outside the hobby and widely different educational backgrounds. They hold occupations as different at tobacco magnate (Maurice Burrus) to judge (William Rehnquist). Politically and economically diverse, stamp collectors can usually be relied on to agree on one thing—they hate innovation in stamp production. What was good enough for Grandpa is good enough for them.
This is not a modern phenomenon. There have been three main innovations in stamp production and design, and each of them has left collectors flummoxed on why something unbroke needed to be fixed. The first collector outcry was by the very first generation of collectors in 1860. Up until then, stamps had been issued imperforated—that is, with no perfs between the stamps. This made stamps hard to use—they had to be cut apart, and since the space between the stamps on a sheet was small, considerable care had to be exercised when cutting stamps apart to keep from damaging them. The innovation of perforations was a great benefit to postal users, facilitating stamp use. Collectors were unimpressed; they felt that perforations made perfect copies impossible to obtain, as the perfs on these first issues often cut the designs. They didn’t like that the early perforated stamps fell apart when they tried to collect blocks, and they didn’t like that the albums then in print had spaces barely big enough for the stamps themselves, and they had to cut the perforated stamps down to the margins to fit them in.The second technological innovation to hit our hobby also left philatelists howling. Beginning about 1960, printing technology changed rapidly, and concerns about counterfeiting decreased as postage costs continued their downward spiral in real terms (the 5¢ first class postage rate of 1847 was about ten times higher in real terms than the 46¢ rate is today). Accordingly, postal services around the world began experimenting with various photo offset types of printing instead of line engraved printing which had been the gold standard for philatelic production up until then. The new printing methods allowed multicolored stamps to be produced at the same price as single colored stamps and all stamps at a fraction of what it used to cost to produce them. Colorful stamps with more interesting designs were possible, and experimentation with design was largely limited by collector resistance. Collectors rebelled against any stamp that was multicolored and looked as if it had been designed with general appeal in mind. Readers of the philatelic magazines of the 1960s and 1970s know this as they remember endless letters to the editors lamenting the change.
In the last thirty years, self adhesives have been the major stamp production change. They have been resisted by collectors, though in the long run they will be good for the hobby as they will remove the extreme gum consciousness that pervades philately today. Adult collectors often want to reproduce their early collecting experiences. As more and more adult philatelists come into the hobby having had as their earliest stamp collecting experience stamps without gum on the back, we will see less attention paid to gum generally. Collectors don’t like change and never have. The reason, though, is not because philatelists are innately conservative (some are, many aren’t) but that the philatelic experience reconnects them with a time and a place and an emotional state that they find comforting and do not wish to change.