Why is stamp collecting called philately?
Stamp collecting started around 18J_~0, soon after the first postage stamps were invented, The ladies of Victorian England were charmed by the pretty scraps of paper with their romantic histories of world travel, At first, collecting stamps was just a fad and people called it timbromania. The word philately was invented when the fad developed into a serious hobby.
Philately is coined from two Greek words and usually the origin of a word gives a clue to its meaning. But this one is baffling. The Greek words from which philately is coined mean someone who loves ¬tax free things or in other words, someone who hates taxes. It is hard to see how this word applies to an earnest collector of government postage stamps.
In the early days of postal service, the postage rate was ;,aid by the person who received the letter. This was changed when the postage stamp was invented in 1840. The cost of mailing was then paid by the sender and the little stamp on the letter was proof that the cost of mailing, or tax for mailing, had been paid. The person who received the letter got a tax free stamp because the tax had already been paid.
Philatelist is a very grand sounding word for a person who collects postage stamps. It was invented by a Frenchman in 1865, just when the serious stamp collectors needed a grand name for themselves, For ,tamp collecting started as a merry fad and people made fun of the ladies who collected enough stamps to paper their dressing rooms.
People called these ardent collectors timbromaniacs and any kind of maniac, of course, is someone with a crazy mania. The first stamps bore pictures of Queen Victoria and it was said that the stamp faddists were more eager than King Henry VIII to collect queens heads. Timbre is the French word for postage stamp and timbromani a meant a mania for postage stamps.
The timbromaniacs did not care what kind of stamps they collected, so long as they had a lot of them. But the stamp saving craze developed into a serious hobby and collectors became choosy about their stamps. The rare ones, the beautiful ones and the unusual ones became valuable and today, there are philatelists who have stamp collections worth many thousands of dollars.
A certain stamp printed in 1856 is the only one of its kind in the world and valued at $150,000. In 1918, a few American air mail stamps were printed with an airplane upside down. They sold for 24 cents, but because of the upside down error, they are now worth $1000 apiece to a philatelist.