{"id":31,"date":"2013-07-21T21:00:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T21:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stampingamericanmemory.org\/?page_id=31"},"modified":"2016-04-21T17:15:48","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T17:15:48","slug":"collecting-as-mania","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/building-philatelic-communities\/collecting-as-mania\/","title":{"rendered":"Collecting as Mania"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the growth of collecting in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, we see collectors of all types of objects labeled as being afflicted with \u201cthe collecting mania.\u201d Evidence as early as 1812 in French publications referred to collectors as developing a mania for pursuing autographs and historical letters. This language does not resurface until the 1860s. According to one assessment in 1868, a stamp collecting mania appeared in the U.S. and affected young people, while the mania for collecting pictures and coins mainly affected adults. ((Originally published as a column in the Paris Spectator, January 4, 1812; collected and translated in Etienne de Jouy, The Paris Spectator, Or, L\u2019hermite de La Chauss\u00e9e-d\u2019Antin, Containing Observations Upon Parisian Manners and Customs at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century, trans. William Jerdan (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816), 96. This article was then re-published in: \u201cA First Night in Racine,\u201d The Knickerbocker, April 1844, 345.; and \u201cCollectors and Collecting,\u201d Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1868, O3.)) Articles referencing the “collecting mania” and a “mania for collections” were published in newspapers across the US, and can be found in the Library of Congress’s database of digitized newspapers Chronicling America<\/em><\/a>. Discussions of manias were common in the popular literature as well. Searching for the term in the Google Books corpus illustrates that the term’s usage peaked in the 1880s<\/a>.
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