Page 27 - LP1478

The London Philatelist

three references to donations. Arranged into chronological sequence it is revealed that the first
donation was made by Bacon in September 1891, almost a year before his first published appeal,
whilst the last was made on 6 September 1899.

Donation references
Year
recorded on pages
1891 1
1892 12
1893 22
1894 73
1895 35
1896 19
1897 15
1898 67
1899 22
1923 1
NULL 6
TOTAL 273

Table 1. Number of references recorded on the Collection pages by year.

At this point it is important to reiterate that the number of references to donations on the pages
does not correlate with the number of donations made to the Collection. In many instances a
donation comprised a number of items, often from various postal authorities. In such cases the
donations were split up and mounted on the relevant pages, therefore a single donation can be
recorded several times across the pages of the Collection. Nevertheless, by arranging the same body
of data by donor and then chronologically, it shows that the two hundred and seventy-three references
on the pages came from one hundred and twenty-nine separate donations.
The reconstructed data arranged by donor also reveals that donations came from a variety of
different sources. The most numerous donors were individuals, comprising 79% of the total
donations to the Collection, whilst donations made by companies comprised 10.5%, followed by
Universities and Government Departments making up 6% and 1.5% of the total donations
respectively. The outstanding 3% of the donations are impossible to categorise since the provenance
data is incomplete. It is also worth noting that the boundaries between these distinctions are fluid
and ambiguous, since some of the individual donors are known to have been stamp dealers and
in the case of the university donations, it is uncertain whether the donations were made in a
personal or institutional capacity.
Types of donor Number of donors Percentage of total
Individuals 53 79
Companies 7 10.5
Universities 4 6
Government Departments 1 1.5
Unclassified 2 3
TOTAL 67 100
Table 2. Types of donor and frequency of donations

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