T

'HE bad effect on collecting of the multiplication of special issues has been recognized for years. Perhaps, however, it is not recognized that the whole problem has been created by collectors, themselves. When this is clearly understood, a solution will appear not the usual panacea of an attempt at organized boycott, nor by barring speculative or needless issues from the catalog. If we go back and trace the development of collecting stamps, the method which I propose of dealing with this evil will be seen as nothing in the world but a measure of ordinary common sense and recovered sanity.

It may even in time restore to some degree genuine general collecting.

What is the reason that nine out of ten collectors lose interest in general collecting and become specialists or quit altogether? It isn't because of the complexities of the pursuit (which are not so tremendous after all) nor because of any inability to get stamps (there were never so many obtainable so easily)-but it is the "great open spaces" in our printed albums which are never going to be filled, unless one is quite mad: Macao, with its swarming mass of surcharges, for example, or Nicaragua, with page on page of confused provisionals, just to name two countries which practically no general collector ever pretends to cope with. (I have known collectors who clipped out of Scott albums all the pages of the Portuguese colonies, on the ground that they were all so much alike that the pages given them wasted. I do not go to this extreme myself.)

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A few surcharges now and then are relished by the wisest men, but three or four solid pages of surcharges, looking like nothing intelligible on earth, will daunt the boldest.

Now when there is added to these floods of surcharges charity sets (what crimes are committed in its name!) and sets commemorative of everything from the discovery of a continent to the desire to obtain a new cricket ground, not to mention airpost stamps for non-existent air routes and

overprints celebrating fairs, we have a mass of stuff which strains our attention almost to the point where it becomes an effort instead of a pleasure to keep up with it all.

Yet we have brought it on ourselves, and this is how we did it.

Up to 1900 there were about 15,000 recognized major varieties; of these, less than 5,000 were surcharged on some standard type. These overprints were generally produced by colonial authorities or by the post offices of some of the smaller countries because of some emergency or shortage, or as in such cases as Griqualand, Montserrat, Eastern Roumelia, or Swazieland they marked the creation of a new political or postal administration.

Collectors regarded these overprints with interest, and they were catalogued and collected on an absolute parity, so far as interest was concerned, with the regular permanent issues. Frequently, the surcharged stamps became very scarce and desirable.

The printed albums in this country followed the French and German model by entering these provisionals right along with the regulra issues, and that came to be the accepted method of entering them in catalogs and albums.

Along toward the end of the 19th Century commemorative issues began to be usual. These, though often of different shapes and types, were entered right along with the rest.

The result of this was that collectors got to thinking of the regulars, the temporary and the special issues all as stamps essentially similar in kind and the conceptoin of a provisional as a temporary makeshift and of a commemorative as a special stamp apart from the regular issues was lost. Frequently, these special issues were unusual in some way, the provisionals always had an air of mystery and change about them, and it was not strange that the average collector began to think of such stamps as the first issues of French offices in Egypt and the first issue of Montserrat not as provisionals (which, of course, they were) but as regular issues