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Figure 2. The King’s Library in the British Museum showing the original Tapling Collection display cases

c.1985. The British Library’s Philatelic Collections: The Photographic Collections.

Figure 3. Edward Denny Bacon. Figure 4. Jane Hamilton.

The British Library’s Philatelic Collections: The Photographic Collections.

Their main responsibilities included arranging and mounting the collection as well as writing

it up for exhibition, tasks which took just over seven years to complete. For the first three years
Bacon worked alone for three days each week. Thereafter, he was assigned Jane Hamilton as an

Assistant to hinge the stamps to the little white card mounts. Once Bacon had arranged them on
the appropriate page, she could then mount them and he could write them up (Negus, 1999, pp8-
9). Figure 5 shows a typical page from the Collection.
Each item was mounted upon a small white card with a red border, which was itself mounted
onto a page with a greenish tint. Bacon’s method of displaying the collection in such a manner was
actually adopted from the layout used by Tapling to write up a small part of his collection.
Nevertheless, Tapling and the British Museum cannot take full credit for producing such a distinctive
and pleasing display. The choice of paper was no doubt influenced by the leaves used within Tapling’s

original stamp albums. In the mid-1880s Tapling acquired a hundred superb unused albums bound
in red Morocco, each containing 60 leaves of a grey-green tint, from his friend Frederick Adolphus
Philbrick (1836-1910) for three guineas each. These had remained in Philbrick’s hands following

the sale of his collection to Philipp La Rènotière von Ferrary in 1882.

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