The history of stamp collecting 10, Mount Brown

Inspired by a series of articles by K. Kouwenberg that appeared in the monthly magazine Philatelie in the late 1970s, Rob Smit rewrites the history of stamp collecting in biweekly installments. This is part 10, Mount Brown.

In the previous episode, I discussed the first English catalogue, published by Booty. Just a month later, another catalogue appeared in England by Mount Brown.

Despite the fact that the catalogue (unlike Booty's) contained no illustrations, the edition was considered better and more complete, and partly for that reason, a greater sales success. Between May 1862 and March 1864, five printings were published with a total print run of about 7500 copies. In the preface, Brown describes a clever trick that is also a marketing ploy. He suggests that every collector should actually have two copies of his catalogue. In both copies, he then underlines the stamps he possesses. He uses one copy himself as a reference, while he exchanges the second copy with a fellow collector, allowing the latter to look through his duplicate stamps to see if there are any copies to supplement or exchange. View the complete second edition by clicking here. Mount's collection contained only about 400 stamps. Nevertheless, he was able to include some 1200 stamps in his catalogue, reportedly through his Saturday afternoon contacts with other collectors. The London Philatelic Society emerged from these gatherings a short time later. Among the group members were Dr. Charles Viner and Francis John Stainforth. In practice, it appears that he primarily obtained much information from the catalogue of J.B. Moens (we will return to Moens in detail later in this series). In turn, Brown's catalogue was copied by John Kline in 1862 and by W.H. Wright in 1863. He took action against both of them, as a result of which Kline's catalogue was hardly available in England and a large part of the print run of Wright's edition had to be destroyed. From 1863 onwards, supplements to this catalogue appeared in 'The Stamp Collector’s Magazine', edited by Dr. Charles Viner. In addition to the catalogue, Brown also published an album and traded in stamps himself. Around 1870, Mount Brown found his philatelic activities to be consuming too much of his time and stopped. However, he remained a collector. Mount Brown lived from 1837 to 1919.

To be continued on September 3.

Published so far:

1. Introduction and start

2. The first collectors

3. The first catalogue

4. Alfred Potiquet

5. Booming 1862

6. Edard de Laplante

7. Natalis Rondot

8. Henri Justin Lallier

9. Frederick W. Booty