Is Stamp Collecting More Popular In Europe?

Is stamp collecting more popular in Europe than in America or other parts of the world? It seems like most manufacturers of the better stamp albums (Davo, SAFE, Lindner, Lighthouse, Gibbons, etc.) are based in Europe.

Thank you.

Palo albums are made here, aren't they? And Scott albums are of a good quality?


Peter

From what I can see European will go with a collection of few albums with quality stamps and in US, in a larger accumulation of albums, it's why Steiner is so popular you can fill bookshelfs of binders for a cheap price. In Canada also, look at Cheng large collection, impressive on the bookshelf, but look at the pages of the albums; so many space fillers. But contrary of what I see in this forum, most Canadian collectors I know, will collect Canadian's mint in a Lighthouse album

Palo use ring binders system, the holes are too smalls and the pages stuck in the ring join when you turn them , I know I have 2 , I finally cut the page to insert them in plastic protectors. Palo sell DAVO, the Davo binders are very good, since Palo print on demand he should offer an option to order pages that will fit in Davo binders, I'm pretty sure he can also order Davo binders with the Logo Palo on them.

See I have a complain and a solution too.

I can't point to any hard data, but yes, more or less. Europe's auction sales, for example, are much higher than in the US, or so I've read. I'm sure the popularity of stamp collecting varies a lot by country and region, though, so it's best not to paint with too broad a brush.

Likely. AFAIK there are north of 150,000 members in various European philatelic associations/societies alone.

-k-

In Denmark, the European country I know best, there are still a fair number of stamp shops, while in the U.S. they've almost become extinct. Denmark may be unusual in that regard, and there could be other reasons for the phenomenon (e.g., lower storefront rent in Copenhagen), but their relative frequency may be a sign of a greater number of collectors per capita.

Stamp Collecting around the world has different styles ,to say one method or style is correct would be a great injustice to these different methods. I grew up around and listening to some of the greatest European Philatelist who lived around Chicago Illinois .Guys like Dr. Matekia ,Bud Henning and John Ross these Chicago guys were the one who trained and taught stamp show judges and helped experts to be certified by their nation's philatelic societies in Europe .
This argument of styles and method of collecting goes back 130 years to the beginning of collecting with the blow up between the French method and the British collecting style and the argument still hasn't been settled .
I had several discussions with Vince the owner of Sandfayre ,the stamp firm in England ,he told me it depends how a collection is put together and displayed on where it should be sold .

To answer the original question ---Yes it is more popular but it is a style of collecting limited to a smaller scope or a limited area of specialization . They don't collect the large international collections we have in the United States .
It always fun to talk to European collectors and see the look on their face when discussing what we each collect .
Many European Stamp Dealers and Collectors have been flying over to the U.S. to buy at our large public auctions because they know our material has not been as picked over for specialized items and finds are more likely than back at the auctions in their home countries . I ran into whole gangs of them during the late 1980's and 1990's at Greg Manning Auctions ,all looking for post WWII huge collections or dealer inventory from American dealers who only used Scott catalogs to build their inventory . These auction lots were gold mines for them .

Floortrader

Could you explain the nineteenth century split between French and British collecting methods if you have a minute, please?

Very few stamp shops in London these days, but loads in the Rue Drouot area in central Paris, where lots of normal shops, rather than coffee shop chains, still survive..

Geoff

As a long-time Commonwealth collector, I've always felt the Brits proportionally were more active in philately than Americans. Collecting differs- lots of interest in shades and flyspecks in Commonwealth collecting.

In the past 5 years or so I've branched out into French, Spanish, Belgian, Netherlands and Portuguese colonies and have noticed that the Europeans seem to be very strong, focused, and specialized collectors. Agree with Floortrader- general collecting seems much less common among Europeans compared with Americans.

Yep. From looking at my Steiner pages and the Scott catalog, an American might look at my German-area collection and think it's fairly advanced. A German collector would probably look at it as a "kiddie" collection that only contains the easy ones as there are vast tracts of specialist material that I haven't even touched yet.

Actually European collectors did have a very strong interest for collecting the world for the first hundred years, but it was pretty much destroyed/denied from the philatelic education due to 'political climate' of post WW2 world. But fortunately the times they are a changing...

Love for details has always been part of European philatelic education. There is no better way to proof that take a look of some of the 'general' European catalogs of the yesteryear.

Here's a page of US BOBs from Senf 'simplified whole world' catalog of 1929. Notice that it is tipping of different shades, paper types, even reprints even if being simplified:



Or here's a view from Zumsteins general Whole Europe catalog of 1949:




-k-

Hi Geoff,

If I remember correctly the French/British difference of approach for a time in the nineteenth century was that at that time French collectors were much more interested in identifying and collecting detailed differences between stamps than their British counterparts, so they made a point of collecting stamps with different perforations etc.

I suspect this is why so much of the traditional technical language of stamp collecting in English is still French: "se-tenant", "percé en arc", "interpanneau", "tete-beche", "couché", "en cheval" etc.