In Great Britain, Stanley Gibbons had the good fortune to be born the same year that the first postage stamp was issued. He was not born on the first day, May 6, but that seems to have bothered him only a little. He loved his stamps— and other people’s too. He was a collector by fourteen, a dealer by sixteen (so he said), and by 1874 he had moved his shop to London where it still remains today. Legend has it that Gibbons was involved in one of the great stamp “finds” of all time (a “find” being a huge hoard of valuable stamps obtained cheaply). Some sailors wandered into his shop with a large sack. They had been in South Africa near the Cape of Good Hope and had come across, by whatever means the imagination might evoke, a huge sack o the old triangular issues of Cape of Good Hope proper. There were pounds of them, and with about 1,500 Cape triangulars to the ounce, there was a sufficient quantity for even Gibbons’s brisk walk-in trade. No one knows what he paid for them, though many care; some say that the firm today still sells from the famous hoard.
In the 1870s and 1880s, countless magazines appeared for philatelists. Collectors’ societies were formed. In Paris, Baron Von Ferrary, a man to whom money was no object, became interested in stamps. Ferrary collected an example of every stamp, and by the time he stopped collecting, there were not many stamps that he did not own. By modern standards, his collection would be worth perhaps $100 million, if so many rarities could be sold at full price at any one time. Ferrary bought fantasies or phony made-up stamps that were presented to him as genuine. He was no fool. Though he knew he had been deceived in some of his purchases, is drive for completion was so fierce that he chose to buy the fantasy rather than possibly pass up a variety that might later prove to be genuine.
In England, Mr. T.K. Tapling of the London Philatelic Society (later the Royal Philatelic Society) gave a collection, not much inferior to Baron Von Ferrary’s, to the British Museum where it can still be seen. In the United States, John Tiffany and John Luff were examining postal records and creating a reference collection so that collectors could know for sure just how rare an item was and whether or not it was genuine. By 1900, the causal stamp-collecting hobby of boys and girls, and the frivolous affectation of the idle, had changed to philately, the hobby of intellectual pursuit– a hobby that held in its sway alike businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and kings.