This article was written by Dan Piazza and appears in the January issue of the American Philatelist.
The essence of collecting,” William H. Gross is fond of saying, “is to bring order from disorder, to put something together.” Since nearly the very beginning of philately, collectors have relied on catalogs to help them organize and make sense of their collections. This month, to join in the theme of this Stamp Catalog Special Issue, I discuss some of the most important catalogs held by the National Postal Museum Library along with links to view electronic copies digitized by Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Figure 1. Cover and Mount Brown’s autograph from the NPM Library’s copy of the fourth edition. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Origins
The First English Language Catalogs
Mount Brown (1837-1919) was a member of the first generation of English philatelists, who began collecting less than twenty years after the Penny Black was issued in 1840. He was among the coterie that met regularly in the rectory of All Hallows Staining Church, London, under the aegis of Reverend Mr. Francis Stainforth – a group that later evolved into the Royal Philatelic Society London. From his own collection and those of his confreres, he compiled the second stamp catalog in the English language. His Catalogue of British, Colonial, and Foreign Postage Stamps appeared in May 1862, just one month after Aids to Stamp Collectors by Frederick Booty. Booty’s catalog was illustrated and Brown’s was not; nonetheless, Brown’s was more detailed and complete and quickly gained popularity. It went through five editions in four years.
Figure 2. A typical page from Phillip’s catalog, showing the attention paid to perforations and plate varieties of the 1872 issue. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
The National Postal Museum Library’s copy of the fourth edition (1863) was the author’s personal copy. It is custom-bound in leather, with Mount Brown’s name embossed in gold on the cover and his autograph on the flyleaf. It, along with a copy of the third edition (1862), was donated as part of the George T. Turner library in 1979. Likewise, our copy of the fifth edition (1864) was the author’s personal copy, and a marking on the inside front cover shows that it was bound in Birmingham, England. This example was gifted to the Smithsonian Institution by the noted American philatelic writer Herman Herst, Jr. in 1956.
Brown’s Catalogue (1862, third edition):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofbrit00brow
Brown’s Catalogue (1863, fourth edition) (Figure 1):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofbri00brow
Brown’s Catalogue (1864, fifth edition):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofbriti00brow
Thornton Lewes and Edward Loines Pemberton
Thornton Lewes (d. October 19, 1869) was the son of George Henry Lewes, an English philosopher and friend of Charles Dickens, while Edward Pemberton (1844-1878) was another of the regular attendees at Rev. Stainforth’s weekly meetings and an early stamp dealer and philatelic publisher. The problem of forged stamps surfaced early in philately’s history, and together the two authored Forged Stamps: How To Detect Them in 1863. Both collectors died at a relatively young age, and their work was carried forward by William Dudley Atlee (The Spud Papers) and Rev. Robert B. Earee (Album Weeds).
Lewes and Pemberton (1863):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/forgedstampshowt00lewe
Stamp Catalogues
Mexico
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) resulted in a variety of provisional and local stamps as Constitutionalists and Zapatistas fought for control of Mexico, sparking significant interest in the stamps and postal history of the country. Little information was available in English, however. The standard work at the time – Catalogue of the Stamps, Envelopes, Wrappers and Postal Cards of Mexico by Henry Collin and Henry L. Calman – was more than twenty years out of date, having been published by the Scott Stamp and Coin Company in 1895. Since then, numerous forgeries had appeared in the philatelic marketplace, causing Mexico’s popularity among collectors to wane. To address the situation, Charles J. Phillips, owner of Stanley Gibbons, Ltd., published a new catalog in 1917 with plating notes and a guide to identifying genuine specimens. The National Postal Museum’s copy of Phillips’ catalog once belonged to Col. Charles S. Hamilton, a Washington, D.C., philatelist and APS Hall of Fame member who served in General Pershing’s Mexican campaign of 1915-1916.
Figure 3. G.H. Kaestlin’s bookplate and a typical page from the Smithsonian copy of Herrick’s catalog, showing the issues of Smolensk and Yekaterinburg. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Collin & Calman (1895):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofstam00coll
Phillips (1917) (Figure 2):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/pricedcatalogueo00phil
Russian Zemstvos
At the end of the nineteenth century, stamps issued for postal services conducted by Russian rural councils (zemstvos) were widely collected within Russia and were also popular with German, Austrian, and French collectors. Their popularity in France owed primarily to a catalog written by S. Koppovsky and published by J.B. Moens of Brussels in 1875. However, in much of the English-speaking world these stamps remained mysterious, with many collectors suspicious that they were little more than “bogus” or fantasy issues with no legitimate postal status. The English-language catalog published by William Herrick – first in serial form in the American Journal of Philately and then as a separate monograph in 1896 – went a long way toward establishing their legal status with American collectors. The National Postal Museum Library’s copy of Herrick’s catalog bears the bookplate of George H. Kaestlin, whose magnificent 13-volume collection of these stamps was donated to the National Philatelic Collection in 1984.
Figure 4. Owner’s mark of W.R. Ricketts and hand-drawn title page, both from Tiffany’s Philatelical Index. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Moens (1875):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/lestimbresposter00moen
Herrick (1896) (Figure 3):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofrussi00herr
Literature Catalogs
The Tiffany Catalogs
In addition to his study of United States stamps in general, and the St. Louis postmaster’s provisionals in particular, John Kerr Tiffany of St. Louis, Missouri, amassed the largest collection of philatelic literature in his time. The National Postal Museum Library owns two of Tiffany’s own catalogs of his personal library.
The first is his Philatelical Library of 1874, which sought to catalog all titles “designed, in whole or part, for stamp collectors.” It includes journals, which are listed by their titles only. Philatelical Library is rare; only 150 copies were privately published by Tiffany (the Smithsonian’s copy is number 37). Philatelical Library is still an important source for the early history of philatelic scholarship, and its publication date of 1874 is generally regarded at the end of philatelic literature’s classic, or incunabula, period.
The other is his unpublished manuscript, Philatelical Index, dating from 1881. The manuscript is, in a way, an extension of Philatelical Library. It updates the list of journal titles, but also attempts an index by subject of the articles found within. It was never published. By 1913, the Tiffany manuscript was owned by William R. Ricketts of Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, who exhibited it at that year’s international stamp show in New York and whose owner’s stamp is on an inside flyleaf. It was later collected by George T. Turner and was included in the section of his library that he willed to the Institution upon his death in 1979.
Figure 5. Owner’s mark of F.A. Bellamy and a typical page of annotations by him, from Volume Two of The Crawford Library. Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Both titles were digitized by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in 2014. Although optical character recognition could be used to make the printed Library text searchable, the Index had to be transcribed by humans because it was handwritten. Volunteers, including members of St. Louis area stamp clubs, completed the task online.
Philatelical Library (1874):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/philatelicallibr00tiff
Philatelical Index (1881, unpublished) (Figure 4):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/philatelicindex00tiff
The Crawford Library
Charles J. Phillips – author of the Mexico catalog discussed above – purchased John K. Tiffany’s library for $10,000 in 1901. Phillips was acting as agent for James Ludovic Lindsay, the 26th Earl of Crawford. Lord Crawford was already a noted bibliophile in other fields, but the purchase of Tiffany’s library interested him seriously in philately. He hired Edward Denny Bacon as his philatelic librarian – a role which directly led to Bacon’s later appointment as Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection owned by King George V – and set about building the largest philatelic library in the world. In 1911, the Philatelic Literature Society published Bacon’s Catalogue of the Philatelic Library of the Earl of Crawford, K.T. in two volumes. Owing to the comprehensiveness of Crawford’s collection, Bacon’s catalog is an essentially complete bibliography of philatelic literature up to that time.
The National Postal Museum Library holds one complete set of the 1911 edition, plus an extra copy of Volume 2. The extra copy once belonged to Frank Arthur Bellamy, the Oxford astronomer and philatelist whose library was second only to Crawford’s. It contains his interleavings and marginal notes, through which he attempted to keep the catalog updated into the 1930s.
Crawford Library Volume One (1911):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/catalogueofphila00craw
Crawford Library Volume Two (1911)—Bellamy’s copy (Figure 5):
library.si.edu/digital-library/book/cataloguephilat00craw
These landmark works of philatelic literature are just a few of the classic titles – many of them catalogs – digitized by the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. To view the complete collection, visit https://library.si.edu/subjects/postage-stamps.
National Postal Museum Branch Librarian Baasil Wilder assisted with the images for this article.