THE UNIQUE ENVELOPE OF ANNAPOLIS (MARYLAND, U.S.A.) IN LORD CRAWFORD'S COLLECTION OF STAMPS OF THE UNITED STATES.
The Image collection was sold in the same year as the Philbrick albums. Mr. W. E. Image was yet another of the vieille garde of Philately, though he ploughed a lone furrow during the early years of his collecting, which began in 1859. His collection, sold for £3,000 in 1882, deserves to be especially noted, as it was in one sense the basis of the great national collection now at the British Museum. The late Mr. T. K. Tapling, M.P., was the purchaser, and so magnificent was his new acquisition that he at one time thought of parting with his own and continuing the Image collection. At this juncture, the death of Mr. Tapling's father enabled him to amalgamate the two collections, his own with that of Mr. Image, and to launch out upon the grandly conceived collection bequeathed in 1891 to the nation.
Mr. Image at first compiled his collection almost entirely by correspondence, and did not see the inside of a dealer's shop until the 'seventies. He is said, however, to have never refused a good specimen of a stamp he lacked, save on one occasion, an historic one. Moëns offered him for £240 the two Post Office Mauritius, but he declined, as he hoped to get another chance at a more moderate figure. That was in the 'seventies. Image lived to the advanced age of ninety-six (b. 1807), and within a few months of his death a copy of the 2d. Post Office alone was sold by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson for £1,450.
But if he lacked the "Post Offices," there was an abundance of other rarities. Philbrick travelled to Bury St. Edmunds to see Image's wonderful unused 6d. orange of Victoria ("beaded oval"), a stamp which in the Mirabaud sale (1909) fetched £140. The copy from the Avery collection attained in 1910 a price still higher. British Guiana, Guadalajara and the American locals were amongst the specially strong sections of this collection.
There have been so many really important collections formed since the Philbrick collection that almost any entry into details becomes invidious in a brief review. The collections of to-day are, as I have indicated, on a more broadly historical basis than was general in the early days of the study, though even the collections of Dr. Gray, Sir Daniel Cooper and Judge Philbrick, and others, were on a sound basis of historical research. Philately has had no more precise or more able historians than Judge Philbrick and his collaborator, Mr. W. A. S. Westoby, while to Dr. Gray we are indebted for the history of most of the English essays of the first period.
PART SHEET (175 STAMPS) OF THE ORDINARY ONE PENNY BLACK STAMP OF GREAT BRITAIN, 1840.