Plate block collecting has long been one of the most popular specialties here in the United States. Many other countries have and have had plate markings in the margins of their sheets. Often these are plate numbers or inscriptions that might ordinarily be of interest. But only in the U.S. (and since WWII, UN and Israel) have marginal markings with the stamps become a thriving specialty of their own.
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No one can prove what the reason for this is, but I think the evidence points to fairly mundane causes. Plate number markings first were put on every sheet of United States stamps when the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) began printing US stamps in 1894 (before that, stamps were printed by private contractors, and most sheets don’t contain plate numbers). The BEP started with plate #1 and then moved consecutively from there. The idea of assembling a collection of stamps showing what plate they were from appealed to early collectors and was the initial impetus to plate block collecting.
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But a second reason was probably even more important to the solidification of plate block collecting as an important pillar of US stamp collecting. Stamp collecting came of age about 1890. Before that it was not a serious hobby, and by the turn of the last century the hobby had hundreds of thousands of adherents worldwide. There were stamp shops in every major city and many minor ones. But the U.S. Post Office was not much interested in hobbyists. U.S. stamp issues were few and rather uninteresting. Between 1910-1928, a period of eighteen years, there was only the Panama Pacific issue to break up the monotony of the Washington-Franklin issue which had the same two or three designs. This is why US collectors have paid such attention to Washington-Franklin varieties, types, and perf varieties that for other countries would be footnotes, not major stamps to collect. Another way that collectors specialized in this early period was plate blocks, and by the time (about 1930) that our Post Office began to satisfy collector demand for newer issues, plate block collecting had solidified its hold on the American collecting psyche.