Elliot Perry may well have been the preeminent philatelist in an era that had some pretty good stamp scholars. Perry began his most famous series of articles in 1931. Entitled “Pat Paragraph”, these scholarly articles continued until the late 1950’s. Collected and republished in 1971 they run to over 650 pages of dense information and musings on classic US stamps and US Locals and Carriers. Perry’s work was one of the pinnacles of philatelic scholarship of the era. Perry himself was considered crusty and disputatious. Disagreements were, to him, personal insults. Arguments became holy crusades. But, without question, he was a devoted and conscientious scholar who greatly advanced the knowledge that we have about our stamps. Working from the effort of John N. Luff, the greatest scholar of the generation before him (whose classic work on US stamps was published in 1902), Perry used original sources to discuss printing methods and stamp usages and sales.
Serious philatelists often lament that the great days of stamp scholarship are behind us, that there are no Elliott Perry’s or Stanley Ashbrook’s or Carroll Chase’s anymore. This misses two essential points. First, the work that these great researchers did only needs to be done once. We don’t need to figure out again how to plate the one cent 1851. And we know the Brattleboro Postmaster Provisional print numbers because Perry found the records and published them. So to lament that scholarship is different today is simply to say that each generation of writers in a field builds on the work of others. But of far greater importance, I think, is the fact that Perry and the founding fathers of philately were writing for an entirely different era.
In 1930, when Perry began his major work, philately had less than 5% of the stamps to collect that we have now. So it is natural that scholarship would concentrate on “classic” philately. The US Scott numbers only got to#700 in 1930. Scott is at over #5000 now. In 1930 there was no First Day Cover collecting to speak of. Plate block collecting was in its infancy and pursued by only a few outlanders. There were only a handful of booklets (not hundreds), no Duck Stamps or Junior Ducks. And that’s just for US issues. The 1930 worldwide Scott catalog was published in a two column, 5”x7’, single volume. If laid out in today’s Scott format it would run to only 500 pages. The 2016 Scott catalog for just worldwide stamps is in six volumes and runs to nearly 10,000 pages.
Before the telescope, astronomy was focused on our solar system out of necessity, as that was the only group of celestial bodies that could reasonably be studied. The telescope vastly expanded scientific horizons. Further advances, building on the work of earlier scientists, allowed for further expansion of astronomical knowledge. The fact that we can now place the origins of the universe at 14 billion years ago (and still counting) does not make Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter any less amazing. And Einstein’s idea that space-time folds on itself (words I can write but a concept I can’t fathom) doesn’t degrade either Copernicus or those who work in physics that is beyond most of our understanding. Fields of study change over time because of what has happened. And we don’t expect scholars of today in other fields to replicate the work of previous generations. And we shouldn’t expect that in philately either.