Open your newspaper or look online, and hardly a day goes by in which some new CNN or Bloomberg poll isn’t measuring some aspect of American life. How much time do we spend watching TV? Or exercising? Or intending to exercise as we watch TV? Nearly every aspect of our lives is polled and measured and evaluated, and if the polls are to be believed, we are a nation of people who say they never have enough time to do the things that they want and yet who seem to be able to have the TV set on eight hours a day.Hobbies in general, and philately in particular, are so small a part of most people’s lives that they never even seem to be asked about by pollsters. Hobby websites that ask readers to participate in polls report that average hobbyists spend about five hours per week on their hobby. But these are not careful polls—they are self reported among people who are already avid enough to be going to hobby website in the first place and then answer a survey. And for those of us for whom our hobby is an important part of our lives, there are many questions that we would like pollsters to ask, and certainly I wish that there had been polls in years gone by so that we might see how attitudes towards philately have changed among people most attached to the hobby.
For instance, how much time do serious collectors spend per week on their hobby? For avid collectors, how many maintain a constant ongoing interest in stamps, and how many have strong collecting periods followed by less active periods? Do collectors specialize more or less now than they used to, or has the massive number of newer issues made detailed specialization less necessary than it used to be to those with a serious case of the collecting disease? What is the average age of serious collectors, and has the overwhelmingly male makeup of the collector fraternity began to add more women in recent years? How popular is stamp collecting in China, and will those collectors continue in their hobby once China lifts currency controls and begins to have a more democratic government?
Stamp dealers and auctioneers sometimes get a feel for what we think some of the answers to these kinds of questions are. It always amazes us, for instance, that a man will buy a rare, specialized item in one of our auctions and then not bid again for years until we have another similar item that he needs. Obviously, he has been carefully examining our catalogs (and how many others) and must put in thousands of hours of search for each item purchased. How do you measure his commitment to philately and the value of his stamp collection to him? Or, what we often see, is a person who buys strongly for a while, disappears sometimes for years, and comes back again strongly, often repeating this pattern over and over again. Is his hobby dormant during the intervals? And if it is, why? Despite all our polling and our knowing, most of the most basic aspects of the relationship of a collector to his stamps are unknown.