Stamp Collecting in the 1920s

Suppose you were a fellow collector of my grandfather Earl Apfelbaum in the 1920s. The probability is that you would be a world wide collector with perhaps a single country concentration. You would have a hardbound Scott album or a McKeels album as Minkus and Harris were still years in the future. You mounted your stamps with hinges and the prevailing philatelic dispute was not over “hinged” versus “never hinged” but over whether the new fangled invention of peelable hinges was worth the additional price (previous to the invention of “peelable glassine hinges”, hinges took off most of the gum if you could remove them at all). The Scott catalog was one volume in less than 300 pages and for your $2.95 you got a listing of all the stamps in the world in a hardbound volume. Everyone belonged to a stamp club and the better clubs set up “catalog clubs” where everyone put in a penny or a nickle a month so that the club could purchase a new volume of Scott each year. Philately was far more social. Collecting meant belonging to a club for trading stamps and visits to the local stamp dealer shops of which there were thousands nationwide. Travelling for business or pleasure always meant a visit to a local shop or club and the different kinds of duplicates that each visitor had for trade made newcomers welcomed indeed. Today a person could put together a wonderful collection of stamps and never meet another collector. That was impossible in 1925.