\nThe earliest stamp collectors earned reputations as \u201ccranks\u201d who were afflicted with a disease, often referred to as the \u201ccollecting mania;\u201d a perception that continued for decades after the hobby emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. Many collectors felt the need to justify why collecting stamps was not \u201ca queer business\u201d and battled accusations that they were engaged in a childish folly by insisting it was a worthy pursuit. ((\u201cThe Collecting Mania,\u201d Washington Post (originally published in New York Tribune), March 17, 1889, 12; E. D. Koontz, \u201c\u2018Collectin\u2019 Stamps,\u201d The Philatelic West and Collectors World 77, no. 1 (September 1920): 29.)) Wealthy Americans and nouveau riche industrial capitalists collected fine art yet their behavior rarely was equated with a mania. ((Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., Collecting in the Gilded Age\u202f: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890-1910 (Pittsburgh, Pa. Hanover: Frick Art & Historical Center\u202f; Distributed by University Press of New England, 1997).; and \u201cCollecting Past and Present,\u201d The Nation 109, no. 2841 (December 13, 1919): 736-77.)) Economically stable Americans of more modest means also learned to collect things in the nineteenth century, and stamps became one of the most popularly collected items. Collecting stamps appealed to many different audiences, and grew in popularity in part because of the ways that this budding hobby community organized in the U.S. during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.<\/p>\n
People began collecting stamps in Great Britain and France soon after the postage revolution in the 1840s, and the practice spread to the U.S. The first dealers in the U.S., George Hussey and James Brennan, J.M. Chute and John W. Kline, Ferdinand Marie Trifet http:\/\/www.nystamp.org\/Intertwining%20Part%201.html were found in New York and Boston in the late 1850s and early 1860s. To promote a serious aspect of studying and collecting stamps, Georges Herpin coined the term \u201cphilately\u201d in 1864, drawing on the Greek root \u201cphilos,\u201d meaning fond of, and \u201catelia,\u201d meaning exemption from tax or tax receipt. Early collectors in Great Britain focused on the colors and subjects of stamps. In contrast, French collectors began examining the elements of stamp production including the variation of shade, paper, watermarks, and perforations with less concern for the subjects. As a handful of international businessmen joined casual enthusiasts in analyzing stamps for their subjects and their production qualities, stamp collectors slowly became \u201cphilatelists.\u201d ((Stanley M. Bierman, The World\u2019s Greatest Stamp Collectors<\/em> (New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1981); and \u201cGood as Chest Protectors,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, January 23, 1893. Some European collectors preferred the term \u201ctimbrology\u201d to refer to stamp collecting. \u201cTimbre\u201d is the French word for stamp. Mauritz Hallgren, All About Stamps: Their History and the Art of Collecting Them<\/em> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 177-185; and Mary H. Lawson, \u201cPhilately,\u201d Arago: People, Postage and the Post<\/em> (Washington, D.C.: National Postal Museum, May 16, 2006), http:\/\/www.arago.si.edu\/index.asp?con=1&cmd=1&mode=1&tid=2027477<\/a>.)) <\/p>\n Philatelists began to connect with other collectors in the U.S. and by the 1880s, the first American stamp association had been established. Predating technical hobby clubs created after World War II, philatelic societies formed a national network of clubs in the nineteenth century to help legitimize their activities, to explain their hobby to a broader audience, and to increase the popularity of the practice. ((Kristen Haring, Ham Radio\u2019s Technical Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).))<\/p>\n By the early twentieth century, a stamp collecting culture emerged as collectors established communities by forming membership clubs, published and circulated hundreds of philatelic papers, and encouraged others to collect. These communities sought to define themselves by a set of practices and behaviors that distinguished members as \u201cphilatelists\u201d and constructed philately as a type of scientific pursuit. Comprised predominantly of white male members of financial means, members wanted to attract new collectors to philatelic clubs, but they also constructed barriers and rules that reinforced exclusivity of the privileged represented by their paying members. ((The Book-of-the-Month Club is an example of that tension. Janice A Radway and NetLibrary, Inc, A Feeling for Books the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). )) <\/p>\n Other collectors never joined clubs but participated in the philatelic culture through the circulation of stamp literature and exposure through mainstream media collecting columns and stories about new commemorative releases. These institutional structures helped to shape how philatelists and collectors viewed themselves and how they practiced their hobby. This community became influential as the hobby grew in popularity and in the ways that philatelists shaped stamp production in the U.S. through the early twentieth century. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The earliest stamp collectors earned reputations as \u201ccranks\u201d who were afflicted with a disease, often referred to as the \u201ccollecting mania;\u201d a perception that continued for decades after the hobby emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. Many collectors felt the need to justify why collecting stamps was not \u201ca queer business\u201d and battled accusations that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":17,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-22","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}