Few--very few--collectors of that period, and indeed of later times, withstood the temptations of a rapidly rising market or the emergencies of pecuniary embarrassments; many sold their collections when prices seemed to be great but were, as events have proved, still in their early stages. One collector retained his collection from 1859 to 1896: its owner, Mr. W. Hughes-Hughes, of the Inner Temple, started collecting in the former year, but ceased active collecting in 1874, from which time his album was latent until 1896--with the exception of some items lent for display at the London Exhibition of 1890. Happily for our instruction, Mr. Hughes-Hughes was one of those methodical men who keep a strict account of expenditures, and he had spent £69 on his stamp-collection in those fifteen years. In 1896 he sold that collection for £3,000. It was then cheap at the latter price, for it contained among its 2,900 varieties a yellow Austrian "Mercury" unused; a 4 cents British Guiana of 1856, on blue "sugar" paper; the 12d. black of Canada unused; plate 77 of the 1d. Great Britain unused; and, _mirabile dictu_, an unused copy of the 4d. red "woodblock" error of the Cape of Good Hope, a stamp which afterwards fetched £500. One could go on to the rare used stamps, and so "pile on the agony," but let it suffice for the present to say that the collection contained many gems, especially in those classic early issues of Victoria, Trinidad, Mauritius, France, Reunion (the 15 centimes), Mexico, Naples (the ½ Tornese in both types), Tuscany, Saxony, &c., the very names of which countries conjure up for the present-day philatelist visions of pocket-money for millionaires.
Hying back to the Continent, the troubles in France led to considerable disruption of the philatelic life, and no doubt many collectors and their albums were parted. M. Oscar Berger-Levrault was the producer of the earliest privately printed lists of stamps. His firm of typographical printers, which had been established in Strasburg (the city of Gutenberg associations), had to move from Strasburg to Nancy, as a result of the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. The work of setting up, in a new centre, establishments for his four hundred workmen left M. Berger-Levrault no time for stamps from 1870 to 1873, and this lapse in the continuity of his collection was so serious a gap that he decided to sell, especially as he had to undertake long bibliographical researches into his family history. He has told us something of his collection, but not the price it realised in 1873. Here is a brief statistical outline:--