Complete United States Collection

According to invertedjenny.com (website dedicated to the history of the inverted Jenny stamps), Bill Gross purchased the unique plate block. He then traded it to the Mystic Stamp Co in exchange for the 1c Franklin Z grill. The site claims that trade made him the "third person to own a complete US stamp collection".

Does anyone know who the other two to achieve this are?

Robert Zoellner and Benjamin K Miller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rober...p_collection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benja...r_Collection

What about the US collection at the Smithsonian? I remember seeing it years ago and thought it was complete.

Jsck Kelley

Jack, even if the Smithsonian has a complete US collection it still would not make it a person! The OP is talking about a single person owning this.

Peter

Is completeness based on the Scott U.S. catalogue numbers?

Yes - at the time that the collections were assembled.

The Zoellner collection can be viewed by looking at the Siegel Auction catalog, which is still available on the Siegel website:
http://siegelauctions.com/sales.php?sale_no=804

You can also download the .pdf or order in print from them.

The Miller collection now lives at the National Postal Museum in the frames in the Gross Gallery. Much of it is online through the Arago website or in the book Rarity Revealed. See: http://arago.si.edu/exhibit_238_toc.html

C.

Siegel's Scott Trepel has written that only Zoellner's was complete, but I am fuzzy about the details of what was missing from the other collections.

If anyone is curious about what it would take to build a US collection to various levels of completeness, you might enjoy this essay by Mr. Trepel (see page 7 in particular):

http://siegelauctions.com/desp/collecting.pdf

Great stuff regarding the historical efforts to gain "complete" US collections.
Thanks for the links!

The question of "what makes a collection complete" is a good one. I feel like most would assume a complete collection is one that has all MAJOR catalog numbers included...but what about minor varieties? Color variations? etc? Completeness is certainly somewhat subjective. For example, from the USPS perspective, many stamps we feel like are entirely different as collectors are just the same produced stamp that might have some unintentional variation in color or design. The casual collector of the 1c Franklin 1851 design would probably just follow catalog numbers to tell them when they had all the relevant stamps, but the serious collector of this design might consider multiple subtle varieties vital to a "complete" collection. What about reprints (e.g. Scott #3-4) that were never designed for postal use? Do those count? What about "experimental" stamps that never reached full approval?

I doubt any of us reaches the level of completeness these men did, but does anyone have a corner of philately that they are pursing a complete collection in (e.g. Washington Franklins? Banknotes? Commemoratives?)? I have not yet tried to zoom in to a particular area myself...there are too many temptations and I can't focus :-)