Richard A. Turton

The following article concerning arguably the most famous stamp collector and collection of all time, was written by Fred J. Melville and published in Stamp Collectors’ Fortnightly (August, 1921).

A Magnet for Rare Stamps
The story of Von Ferrary and his wonderful collection is full of mystery and romance. Very little is known of the man, and much has been conjectured both of the man and his many possessions. Fabulously rich, he gathered unto himself all the postage stamps of the world in every variety, and of the greater rarities he loved to secure many duplicates. A Croesus in wealth he made his stamp room in the Austrian Embassy building in the boulevard St. Germaine quarter of Paris a veritable, Alladin’s cave of priceless philatelic gems. He had everything in his favour.

He started in the days when stamp collecting was young and when Philately as a sincere science was as yet unnamed. In those days tlie price of the rarest stamp known did not run to more than shillings. Through half a century Von Ferrary pursued the cult of the rare postage stamp, and, as prices rose, his purse strings expanded with them, and it is no exaggeration to say that no price was too much for him to pay to secure possession of a rarity that had hitherto escaped him. His name and the fame of his purchases and of his collection spread throughout the world, and the older dealers of all countries, whenever they procured newly discovered rarities, sent them forthwith to Von Ferrary, pricing them according to their own fancy or the measure of their coveting. Thus did the stamps of great price, found in the uttermost parts of the earth, get drawn to one magnetic centre in Paris, into the vast collection which Von Ferrary spent half a century of his life in getting together.

Ferrary’s Fads.
I have said that Von Ferrary was a man of mystery, and but little is known of the man or his life. Even his names have been mysteriously confusing, and his rare appearances in public prints have been mostly designed to suppress real or imaginary grievances which he felt against persons who attributed to him titles which he entirely and consistently disclaimed. Possibly, had he lived, he would have again protested at the recent statement in a London magazine, in an article by the Infanta Eulalia of Spain, in which H.R.H. says “The Duke of Galliera had a son Phillipo, who refused absolutely to use the privileges which his birth had bestowed upon him. What were his reasons nobody knows.”

Philipp von Ferrary was born in 1848, the year of the revolution which brought about the downfall of Louis-Philippe, who was godfather to the infant Von Ferrary. Mr. Charles J. Phillips in the obituary notice in the London Philatelist (xxvi., 1-17) is in error in stating “he must have been born about 1858-60” and that he “must have been a collector for some 45 years.” He became a pupil at the lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the Ecole Centrale. and in one of his later eccentricities returned to the latter as a teacher in a curious desire to earn his own livelihood although he was possessed of more than ample means.

He was a neurasthenic nerson moved by fervent passions in some of his rare letters he mentions his vivid recollection of “the distress inflicted on my young soul by the disasters of Magenta and Solferino,” which occurred in his eleventh year, and “never did I feel purer joy than for the days of Custozza and Lissa” seven years later. It appeared to be an obsession with him that enemies were darkly intriguing against him by joining his name to Italian tides, and he energetically protested that he was never of Italian nationality; and never had any right to the alleged titles, and as a son of Austria he “always felt a repulsion for Italy as against Austria’s bitter foe.”

Memorable Purchases
The Ferrary collection was built up stamp by stamp, but some of its richest accessions were obtained by the absorption of several notable early collections. He bought the important general collection founded by the late Judge Philbrick (except for the Great Britain portion) for £8,000 in 1880. In this was the bulk of the collection formed by Sir Daniel Cooper, Bart., K.C.M.G:, the first President of the London Philatelic Society. Another important collection bought outright by Ferrary was that of another of the very early collectors, Baron Arthur de Rothschild. Besides these two vast collections he acquired many less important ones.

Like most collectors of the old school he developed special fancies from time to time for particular stamps, but almost anything rare possessed a strong appeal for him. At least seven of the known copies of the Post Office Mauritius were acquired by him, of which five or six are still in the collection. At another time he appeared to become smitten with Capes, Hawaiians, Sydney Views, Reunion, Moldavians, early German States, and so on, and Mr. Griebert has told how in the early nineties he was particularly fond of the 3 pfennige red saxony, 1850, of which he must have acquired a fair quantity unused at £3 to $4 each.

Philatelic “Vandalism”
Mr. Griebert has also told me that like many collectors of the old school, Ferrary never cared for pairs or blocks, although he would be very eager to collect as many varieties and shades of single stamps as possible; nor did he care to insert any stamps on original covers. When Mr. Griebert sold him the Modena Provisional Government 80 cents on the entire cover, Ferrary immediately tore the stamp off the letter!

In spite of this many fine blocks and pairs, and numerous rare stamps on entire do survive in the collection, and indeed it would have been a real misfortune to philately if some of the fine blocks had been separated and had the famous rarities been divorced from their covers.

Many are the estimates of the amount Ferrary spent on his collection, of the number of stamps it contains, and of its present or recent value. Most of these are entirely speculative. It was estimated in Messrs. Hardy & Bacon’s “The Stamp Collector,” 1897, that he had then spent a quarter of a million on the collection. He continued spending more or less freely on stamps, probably up to £10,000 a year until the war broke out. Probably, all told, his purchases were a little over £250,000. On several occasions we remember there were suits in the French courts to restrain his enormous expenditure on stamps, suits initiated by the trustees or heirs of his revenues. An estimate of the number of items, stamps, blocks, sheets, etc., may be somewhere around 200,000, and the value to-day, estimated in prominent stamp circles in France, as around ten million francs, is undoubtedly far below the mark, when a mere 304 stamps included in the first sale fetched a million francs, and those not the rarest and most valuable selections.

The Finding of the Unique Guinana
In an interview with the “finder of the rarest stamp in the world,” in the British Guina Philatelic Journal, it is said to have been found by Mr. L. Vernon Vaughan in 1873, and sold by him for 6s. to Mr. N.R. McKinnon, in whose collection it remained “for near ten years when it found a purchaser for £25 in one of the London merchants.” This latter statement is not strictly correct. Mr. McKinnon sent his collection to a correspondent, Mr. Wylie Hill, in Glasgow to sell for him in 1878. The correspondent offered it to Edward Pemberton, but through illness or other accident he did not close with the offer”, and Mr. Hill then offered it to a number of other dealers by the same post. Mr. Thomas Ridpath, of Liverpool, got his letter at a quarter to five one day and by eight that night was en route for Glasgow, where he acquired the collection for £120 the next day. (It had, I believe, been offered to Pemberton for £110) The collection contained Ferrary’s single copy of the 2 cents circular, already mentioned, and amongst numerous other rare early Guianas, the celebrated unique stamp, the 1 cent of 1856. It is black on pale red paper.

Pemberton, who saw this One Cent stamp, wrote of it to Philbrick:

“ONE CENT red, 1856!!! as genuine as anything ever was.”

Hawaiian Missionaries
Of the rare “Missionary” stamps of Hawaii, 1851, so called because most of the copies known were found on letters sent home by missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, Ferrary possessed about two score. The late Mr. Tapling possessed a dozen, and the late Mr. Crocker in his fine specialised collection had sixteen. All four stamps are of great rarity, but the two cents stands out as one of the rarest stamps in the world, equal to the 2 cents circular Guiana stamp. There are ten copies known, and Ferrary had four of them, two of which are said to be unused.

There are two types of each of the values in this set, and of the 2 cents I believe only three are known of type I; the other seven are type II.