Stamp collecting began almost coincidentally with the issuance of stamps. An advertisement in The Times of London in 1841 spoke of a lady desiring to paper the walls of her dressing room with Penny Blacks. She asked that people send her any stamps they might have received in the mail to enable her to complete the task. It has been suggested by on philatelic wag that she could not have been much of a beauty to want so much black in her dressing room. A second figured she had a morbid disposition. And a third complimented her on her foresight: to paper a 6-foot by 8-foot dressing room would take stamps worth today about $5 million. And she didn’t pay a penny!
By 1842, stamp collecting was England’s newest fad. But it was a drawing room habit, not a serious hobby. With only a few stamps issued, it could hardly have been otherwise. Women collected in far greater proportion than men (this is still true if we are to believe the United States Postal Service surveys, though until recently men have tended to spend more money on stamps than have women). Alluding to the popularity of women collecting the Penny Black and Penny Red, both with young Queen Victoria’s picture on them, Punch quipped: “The ladies of England betray more anxiety to treasure of Queen’s heads than Henry VIII did to get rid of them.” And later, Punch again parodied people’s desire for “every spit-upon postage stamp.”
But these were stamp-savers, not collectors— hoarders to whom each new issue meant as much as the last. The distinction of a “collector” is his or her ability to discriminate and a disposition to search for favorites, preferring one stamp to another for purely personal reasons. We owe the birth of philately to the French who, in the early 1850s in Paris, were the first to really examine their stamps. (France did not issue its first stamp until nearly ten years after Great Britain; accordingly, the supply of stamps in France until 1850 was limited.) These Parisians examined the designs and looked for plate flaws, little cracks, or irregularities that appeared subsequent to the plate’s production. Later, they began to search for watermark and perforation varieties.
Stamp collectors were said to be afflicted by “Timbremania” which translates (from the French) roughly as stamp craziness. (A half-hour film on the history and techniques of stamp collecting made under the auspices of the American Philatelic Society bears this name.) But the term “Timbremania” applied to stamp lovers seemed too derogatory to the first French collectors. So, in 1864, in a Paris stamp magazine, George Herpin suggested a new name for the hobby— philately. He wanted a Greek name, he said, so that stamp collecting could be referred to in the same way all over the world. The word “philately” translates as philos (love of) and atelia (tax-free). Herpin was groping for a way to say “postage stamp” in the Greek language, where it was unknown; he chose atelia, meaning “tax-free,” because letters forwarded with stamps did not need to be paid for on delivery, so in a sense they were tax-free. Though perhaps Herpin could have chosen a better term, the hobby was ripe for a translingual name.
