The Future of Latin American Philately

I’ve lost count of the articles I’ve read over the years discussing philately’s future. Not to mention the letters submitted to magazines and journals, invariably bemoaning the purported decline in interest in stamp collecting.

The arguments follow a familiar pattern and tend to focus on two well-worn themes…

One: children don’t collect stamps anymore so they won’t collect when they’re older, and Two: stamps are rarely used for postage, so potential collectors are no longer exposed to them (out of sight, out of mind).

I disagree entirely.

In fact I’d go so far as to posit that philately has entered a Golden Age, offering a depth of experience and access that previous generations would never have deemed possible.

The proliferation of part-time dealers and casual sellers via the internet has increased the availability of material to a level way beyond the dreams of earlier collectors, all of which has happened in a very short space of time. With availability comes choice, the chance to be picky on quality, to choose from wide selections of alternatives and to no longer have to make do with a space filler “because that was the only copy the local dealer had in stock”.

Indeed, to quote from a recent letter from the auctioneers Corinphila, “Aesthetic aspects are also becoming increasingly important”.

Over the past couple of decades, alongside the omnipresent eBay, virtually every auction house has added an online presence, yet further providing the collector with a constant stream of choice morsels to bolster their collection.

And let’s not forget the extraordinary growth in the accessibility of philatelic information. No longer are you dependent on your local library (or philatelic library for those of us lucky enough to be near one). In seconds you can now ask for assistance in a forum, search through a back copy of a journal published fifty years ago or view another collector’s life’s work online.

Resource tools such as Peter Moorer’s ‘Interactive Philatelic Index’ now boasts over 10,000 entries, a substantial majority dedicated to Latin America and covering an extraordinary depth of searchability from across the decades.

And this is before AI gets going.

In short, we are truly spoilt.

The only constant is change

I don’t buy in to the theory of the shrinking collector base. In fact, the opposite. It’s just that new collectors may not have started in the same way you did (as a youngster, perhaps?), may not collect in the same way or even live on the same continent.

If we take a more international view of the collector base, the numbers coming from Asia are particularly encouraging. TAIPEI 2023 attracted 225,000 visitors, a large percentage from a younger demographic. And the last China international exceeded over one million attendees.

What about actual sales of stamps? eBay offers the ability to track past sales for the previous quarter. For Latin American material alone, over 50,000 transactions were made over the last three months. That’s averaging 200,000+ transactions per annum

Look at purchases across all countries collected and it totals over 1.7 million transactions every twelve months.

And that’s just one sales channel. Someone, somewhere is buying this stuff.

Familiarity breeds complacency though. Change often happens incrementally and by stealth, not necessarily in giant leaps. We tend to focus not on the transformational effect that digitisation has brought but on the inevitable loss and disruption that accompanies change at such a scale. We absentmindedly forget our recently acquired good fortune.

Of course, there have been casualties of this disruption.

Demand, supply and market values

If you spent good money on your collection before the advent of the internet, you may well not recoup the full cost of some of your earlier purchases. The ‘old guard’ established dealer/auctioneer monopoly on available material has long since been broken. The vast choice now offered from sellers in every corner of the globe, coupled with price transparency has had an inevitable impact in some sectors of the market.

Values have softened in less popular areas and material with easy availability, high volume printings or below average quality has been understandably marked down. Conversely, premiums are happily paid for that perfectly struck SON postmark or mathematically well-centred stamp. No longer the need to have to accept second best when you can keep upgrading…

As a region, Latin American collecting seems to have done much better than some of the more ‘popular’ markets (German material springs to mind). Certainly demand appears strong across most countries in the region.

Reinforcing this is a recent market comment from auctioneers Kellehers: “There is a cooling of the market for Great Britain and Colonial issues as well as the rest of Europe. Latin, South and Central American markets remain strong, driven by the very low supply”.

One quirk of the boom in online sales is the relative rise in cost (not value) of low denomination stamps. You may need a stamp that only catalogues at 50c to fill a gap, but it’d take an altruistic seller to list it at full cat., let alone at a discount. It just ain’t worth the effort.

So we end up with the odd situation where collectors are paying a multiple of catalogue price to fill that elusive gap. It remains to be seen whether catalogue editors remain committed to listing the theoretical value of inexpensive stamps or migrate to the new reality of actual transactional costs.

The transition from organised philately

The other casualty we are becoming rather familiar with is the decline in ‘organised philately’, notably bourses, exhibitions and membership based societies. Commentators ascribe this to a decline in collecting without paying attention to the wider context.

This isn’t a purely philatelic phenomenon.

Check the participation rates of many traditional clubs, societies and professional associations and you will find similar declines in membership. For example the major service clubs such as the Lions, Rotary and Masons have been in significant decline over the past two to three decades.

A recent article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic talks about “the anti-social revolution”. “Between 2003 and 2022, American men reduced the amount of time they spent face-to-face socialising by about 30% on average”. “…there is no statistical record of any other period in US history when people have spent more time on their own”.

He concludes “…American’s are getting less and less of (face-to-face interaction) as community based rituals dwindle and televisions, computers and phones capture ever more of our attention”.

Philately is, by its nature, a predominantly solitary activity, ironically well-suited to this new era of non-social engagement.

In short, the decline in organised philately does not correlate to a decline in stamp collecting. Far from it. It is simply part of a much wider social trend as collectors migrate to digital channels to connect, share and discover.

James Gavin, who launched the philatelic aggregator site ‘The Digital Philatelist’ in 2020, now has in excess of 100,000 visits a year to his site. From a standing start. This isn’t decline. This is transition.

Tom Droege who runs Stamp Auction Network released some very revealing numbers last year that illustrates this shift. He hired a social media marketing professional to map out how stamp collecting is represented amongst the key social channels.

Facebook contained 51 stamp collecting groups with 478,000 members. Twitter had 90 groups with 422,000 members and Instagram had just under 30 groups with 49,000 members.

If none of these channels existed, a proportion of this near 1 million group of subscribers would probably be involved in organised philately instead.

Also interesting to note is that Stamp Auction Network now has over 8,000 subscribers to its TikTok account. When it analysed its subscriber base last year, over 60% were under 44 years old and over 40% were aged less than 34.

It is but one snapshot but it does illustrate some of the fundamental shifts that more conservative collectors may not be aware of.

In essence, the emphasis in involvement is shifting away from traditional channels and towards the digital realm. The era of volunteer presidents, membership secretaries, treasurers and editors is being replaced by more casual affiliations with minimal commitment and the ability to ‘dip in and out’ at will.

The future of philatelic societies

So where does this leave the philatelic societies that support Latin American collectors?

Our societies are broadly broken down in to two camps: the English speaking and the Spanish. The exceptions are the Netherlands (which has its own Latin American society) and Germany (which has a society for Latin America and another specifically for Brazil).

Those that communicate in English are all American in origin and are long-established affiliates of the APS. This includes the representative societies for Brazil, Colombia and Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico and Nicaragua. Many, if not all, have struggled at some stage to find a permanent management team of volunteers, often with committed members multi-tasking in more than one role.

These difficulties are then compounded by the ongoing clarion call for submissions and contributions to maintain a regularly issued journal, one of the key benefits of membership.

I’m a big fan of philatelic societies and hope all the foregoing continue to thrive. But we have to be cognisant of realities and prepare for this changing landscape. Of the alternatives available, I don’t think I’d be alone in advocating the preferable choice of the continuation of each society. But if not, what are the other options?

The default is to put the society ‘on ice’ and wait for new volunteers to emerge at some stage in the future. This is the route which has unfortunately befallen The Brazil Philatelic Association, the grandaddy of Latin American societies who first started recruiting members back in 1911. Without any current leadership, the society has essentially been rudderless since pre-COVID.

The BPA is one of the few societies that has yet to digitise its back catalogue of journals; in my view one of the big draws of membership with the enormous benefit of being able to trawl through the investigative work of past collectors. I hope this can be remedied one day (perhaps by the APS).

The second alternative is to move from a formal structure to a more fluid, flexible model that does away with a board, legal status, membership dues, AGM’s and a regular journal. This has the downside of potential stagnation (why be a member if there are no benefits?) but doesn’t prevent enthusiastic individuals from driving the society forwards and adding value in other ways. Providing the audience can communicate, new initiatives will ebb and flow. There are numerous philatelic Facebook groups that operate in this way.

There have been some spectacular recent successes, notably Mi Oficina with its regular programme of You Tube videos, now numbering well over 2000 subscribers and coming up for 750 video presentations.

As another example, coming back to Brazil, the decline in the fortunes of the Brazil Philatelic Association in no way represents a decline in the interest in Brazilian philately.

In fact, the opposite.

In complete contrast, one of the most recent remarkable achievements has been the success of Filabras, the Association of Brazilian Philatelists. Having only launched in 2020 and charging no membership dues, it now has over 1500 members, driven forwards by a handful of enthusiasts. The collectors have not gone away.

There is a third alternative: consolidation. Any small philatelic society will usually have its own editor, webmaster, president, journal etc. But the structure is no different for a larger society. By amalgamating individual country societies under one banner, the benefits of scale can be realised much as they are in the business world of mergers and acquisitions.

The volunteer pool increases (despite the number of roles being similar in number to a small society), a larger membership group brings economies of scale and the variety of content keeps the audience stimulated. Perhaps a Central American Philatelic Society or even a Latin American Society is a future alternative worthy of consideration; a more modernised version of The Spanish Main which thrived between 1972 and 2004.

We also shouldn’t dismiss the potential to unite both English and Spanish speaking collector bases, yet further increasing membership numbers. The recent proliferation of AI tools can make journal translation near-instantaneous. After an editorial philatelic sense check, a multi-language journal can be a straightforward proposition.

The Cuban Philatelic Society’s journal is already multi-lingual and the Peruvian Philatelic Association has recently started adding English language articles to its excellent journal Filatelia Peruana.

Times may be changing in philately but, I believe, the future remains bright.

As ever, comments welcome.