A hobby is not an academic discipline. Books and articles are written about hobbies, and millions of people may be devotees, but the origins of the hobby and the contributions of the earliest adherents of the hobby are not often remembered in philately. But if it wasn’t for the contributions of fewer than a dozen men, our hobby wouldn’t have evolved into the serious discipline that it is today. It is these people who separate philately from button collecting. In the United States, no early philatelist had more impact on making stamp collecting a serious hobby than John N. Luff.
John N. Luff was born in 1860, and, a stamp collector from childhood, he was involved in US philately in its very earliest years. Luff became a professional philatelist in his twenties and was the President of the Scott Stamp and Coin Company and an editor of the Scott catalog. He was a founder of the Collector’s Club in New York and had one of the great collections of United States stamps. His main contributions to philately were two. He was a tireless researcher and in 1902 published the book The Postage Stamps of the United States, a detailed history of the earliest stamps that our country produced.
Luff understood the problems facing the first historian looking at a new area. Before 1890, American stamps were produced by private contractors. Many of these companies were out of business or no longer had their records; so it was very difficult to piece together the story of what really happened. Luff combed through warehouse records and interviewed old printers to try to get at the real story. Luff’s work has been the basis of much of what is known of early United States stamps. Luff’s other, even greater, contribution was in the field of forgeries and expertizations. In the pre-1890 period, most collectors didn’t much mind the prospect of having reprints and forgeries in their collection. Philatelic tastes change all the time, and the goal for many of the first generation of collectors was to fill the space, regardless of whether the stamp was genuine or not. Luff was part of the second and third generation of collectors that emphasized originality, and Luff put together one of the great collections of reference material