George Sloane began the first of his weekly columns for Stamps Magazine nearly eighty years ago and his last over fifty years ago. People started collecting stamps in earnest about 1860 which means our hobby is about 150 years old . This places Sloane firmly in the middle period to early modern period of our hobby. Issues that don’t concern us today are constantly addressed in Sloane’s writings. Counterfeits were a major concern and exposing the classic philatelic forgers and their wares was continually addressed. Today we have a far greater concern about philatelic alterations and those of us not trained in the earlier school of our hobby forget that until about 1900 forgeries were collected side by side with the genuine in even the finest collections. Ferrary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrary unknowingly (and perhaps knowingly) spent thousands on fakes and it was the winnowing of of forgeries out of collections and into reference libraries that was the main accomplishment of the first one hundred years of philatelic scholarship
Other aspects of Sloane show his interests and his charm. He write in 1951 of a new Scott catalog edition that lists only face different stamps with no varieties and suggests wryly that the edition will be a big seller for dealers who will use the book to prove to unknowledgeable sellers that they have only the cheapest varieties. Or his detailed instructions on how to use hydrogen peroxide to counter the color change produced in red stamps from the sulphur in the sulphur- dioxide in the air. This is the great philatelic benefit of the Clean Air acts of the last 40 years. Today’s air is far cleaner and does far less long term damage to our stamps. And consider Sloan’s 1948 piece on “conditionitis” a form of philatelic hypochondria where all the joy of collecting stamps is subsumed to the quest for perfection. Many things never change