The hobby of philately just like everything else chages and adapts along with time. Several years ago, I had a real treat. I had a chance to work on a collection in which the last stamp was put in the album in 1921. The Collector died in that year and his great grandchildren decided to sell the stamps some eighty years later. Collecting styles have changed over the years and working on this collection brought back memories of the old times. A collector in 1921 was never content with having one example of a stamp. This collection had no less than 20 5c 1847s were as well as a number of 10c. But the real interest began with the 1861 issue where collectors of that bye gone era collected numerous shades and better cancels. The 1861s contained Civil War Patriotics, the 1869s fancy cancels and used in Japan and the Banknotes had a plethora of interesting and specialized subsections that were a pleasure to behold.
This collection was especially interesting as the collector continued his specialized collection right up through the early Washington-Franklin issues with many better usages including Pivate perfs. And the foreign section was wonderful too.
Old timers lament the lack of such inclusive collections in our age of one only -perfect condition collecting. Some of the change has to do with money. If you look at the prices great granddad paid (and he wrote them underneath each stamp) you see that even with the stagnation of stamp prices over the last 20-30 years that real stamp prices 90 years ago were far less than they are today. But the main difference between collecting then and collecting today is knowledge. Great granddad knew his stamps, knew what they should look like and what was available to compliment each page. I don’t think it’s that our generation of collectors is lazier than the old timers or that we don’t have access to the information or the material. I think the issue is that we have so much more on our plates today competing for our time so that for the vast majority of collectors their collection is one of many things that interests them. Back then Granddad’s collection broke into 350 wonderful US and Foreign lots and I am sure brought joy to numerous collectors in the twenty first century as an echo from the times gone by.
