The Stamp-Collecting Mania.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 478, 7 June 1890, Page 6

The Stamp-Collecting Mania.

There exists in Paris (“ Galignani ’’ says) a regular market or exchange for old stamps. It is held every Sunday afternoon in the Avenue Gabriel, Champs Elysees, and is attended by some 50 or 60 persons of all ages and social positions. Twenty-five years ago the various stamps to be obtained did not exceed 500. Nowadays soma albums at Last 3,000. In the Berlin Museum there are 4,500 specimens, so it is said, of which 2,460 are European and 1,147 American. The French Navy Department in Paris has the largest collection in the world. This, of course, is public property. The most valuable of all private collections belongs to M. Philippe de Ferrari, of the Galliera family, who regularly attends the Paris mart to enrich his album. This family souvenir has already cost more than £60,000. Not the least curious sight in Paris is the weekly gathering, in the broad alley of the Champs Eiysoes, of these posttrading and selling ‘ fcs paper. This passion the life of more than one more than one fortune. * • Mpn outsider reveals the at issue. There is no tuss, bargain is transacted quietly. Signs often take the place of words. A would-be buyer approaches ; the seller opens his stampbook and silently turns over its well-stocked leaves. Let it be remembered that every square inch of a postage stamp album costs money, and sometimes a sovereign will not be enough to purchase some old stamp which, when new, was worth but a halfpenny. Indeed, a sovereign would be 4 dirt cheap ’ for some special favourite and coveted 6fcamp which is bard to be gob. A certain English stamp, issued in 1840, bearing the letters V.R., is now so rare that it will bring as much as £B. What is known as the blue stamp of Naples, 1850, is now worth between £lO and £l2. There is a ‘lost pleiad,’ so to speak, in the shape of a postage stamp issued by the Government of British Guiana in 1856, which now commands at public auction about £SO, Within the last few years a perfect craze for the collection of postage stamps has sprung up in Germany, and extends as in France to grown-up people engaged in various walks of fife—post-office and other officials, clerks, young business men, etc. It infests, in fact, all ranks in society. A postage stamp exchange and mart was opened in Vienna in 1887. It holds its meetings in a large seven-windowed room, has its regular organisation, officers, and even a newspaper. The Austrian Post Office sells annually 8,00011. worth of stamps out of use to collectors. No less than 60,00011. worth of Eastern postage stamps are exported every year from Vienna. Cards of admission to tho Postage Stamp Exchange are on no conditions delivered to collectors under 18 yoars of age. Nob long ago General Kaulbara sent to one of the Russian papers a letter conceived as follows :— ‘ I desire to express my lively sense of gratitude to the foreigners who detest me, for the great number of anonymous letters that they have sent me. These letters have furnished me some amusement, and at the same time they have augmented the postage-stamp collection of my little daughter.’