The Re-emergence of the Worldwide Collector
I first started collecting stamps in the 1950's, as a young boy of 10. Almost every comic book and many magazines at that time had an advertisement for "everything you need to start collecting stamps" for $1. The package contained a softcover stamp album, a packet of stamps, hinges, and some sort of paperback book on stamp collecting. These were offered by approval dealers, looking for new, mostly young customers to whom they could sell overpriced approval merchandise. Whatever the reason, they got a LOT of young people interested in stamp collecting. A fair number of them still collect stamps.
Most of those young stamp collectors of the 1950's (perhaps even from the mid-1940's to the late 1960's) began as worldwide collectors. The album I remember is the old H.E. Harris "Discoverer" album, a slightly oversize (approximately 9" x 12") softcover affair with approximately 150 pages and space for about 25,000 stamps. I'm sure all the stamps I received with the album were the cheapest varieties, but it was a thrill to find the country they belonged to, and find where to mount them in my album.
It was also possible in the 1950's to buy "big bags of 1000 foreign stamps" for $1. These were mostly on paper, and again, probably the most common stamps available at the time. Duplication sometimes accounted for 95% of the material in the bag, but young collectors like myself would studiously soak all that cheap material off paper and carefully put the stamps we needed in our albums. There were five people approximately my age in my neighborhood (somewhat rural - about five square miles) that collected stamps, and most of us had the same stamp album. We would get together on a Saturday afternoon at one or another of our homes and trade stamps and show off our prize possessions. We were all proud of the fact that we "collected the whole world"!
This boom in stamp collectors corresponded to the "baby boom" following World War II, so there were a substantial number of new collectors being added every year for a number of years!
"Reality" set in for most of those worldwide collectors in the 1960's, when they started working and paying their own expenses, going to college, raising families, buying houses and cars, and doing all those other adult things that severely limit the amount of free cash available to put into any hobby. Many, perhaps most, adjusted by either putting their collections away, reducing the scope of their collecting interests"specializing"), or curtailing their hobby spending significantly. Inflation, spiraling costs, new interests, and a diminishing number of young people cut the number of large approval dealers significantly. The deluge of "new issues" from newly independent African and Southwest Asian countries and an unpopular foreign war reduced the interest of U.S. collectors in "collecting the world" even more. The cost of building a significant collection of all the stamps of the world skyrocketed, too, with albums and catalogues growing enormously in both size and expense. The number of stamps available to collect first doubled, then tripled, and then quadrupled. It became common to hear that the number of stamps issued in the "last three years" exceeded the total number issued during the first 100 years of the use of postage stamps.
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