pioneer of the stamp trade to retire and indulge his globe-trotting
propensities to the full. He sold his business for £25,000, and, still
in the prime of life, retired to a snug little villa on the banks of
the Thames. The business was converted into a Limited Liability
Company, and the Managing Director may be said to be a product of the
original business, for it was a present of a guinea packet of Stanley
Gibbons's stamps that first whetted his appetite for stamp collecting,
and eventually for stamp dealing. Mr. Gibbons had for a great many
years conducted his business from his private house. The new broom
changed all that, and opened out in fine premises in the Strand,
W.C., where the Company now occupy the whole of one house and the
greater part of the adjoining premises. In every room busy hands are
at work all the day long endeavouring to keep pace with a world-wide
business which began with a few sheets in the corner of a chemist's
shop window in the town of Plymouth.

And now, looking back on the humdrum days of the beginnings of the
stamp trade, what opportunities do they not seem to have missed! Could
they but have foreseen the present-day developments, a few
unconsidered trifles, valued at a few pence in those days, put away in
a bottom drawer, would to-day net a fortune. Young Gibbons, amongst
his early purchases, bought from a couple of sailors at Plymouth for
£5 a sackful of triangular Cape of Good Hope stamps, a large
proportion being the rare so-called Woodblocks, with many of the
Errors described in the list of great rarities in another chapter.
Those Errors he disposed of at 2s. 6d. each. They are now worth from
£60 to £75 each. And the ordinary Woodblocks, which were so
plentifully represented in that sackful, are now catalogued at from
50s. to £9 apiece. Strange as it may seem, those were the common
stamps of those days, and they are the rarities of to-day.