Edward Loines Pemberton

Edward Loines Pemberton (10 December 1844 – 12 December 1878) was a pioneering philatelist and stamp dealer who was a leading advocate of the scientific (or French) school of philately and a founding member of The Philatelic Society, London, now The Royal Philatelic Society London. Pemberton was entered on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in 1921 as one of the fathers of philately. He was born in New York City but educated in Britain by relatives when his parents died shortly after his birth. His son, Percival Loines Pemberton (1875-1949) was also an eminent philatelist.

In the 1860s Pemberton advocated the study of all aspects of stamp production including paper, watermark, printing and perforation. This was known as the scientific or French school. By contrast the English school advocated that only the actual printed design mattered and that every other aspect of a stamp should be ignored. Some English collectors even advocated cutting the perforations from stamps before mounting so that there was no difference between a perforated and imperforate stamp in the album. At the time, the matter of how exactly to collect stamps had not been settled and the triumph of scientific philately over the simpler English methods lead directly to the sophisticated philatelic methods used today. Pemberton's 1867 Catalogue of the Very Fine and Very Complete Collection of Postage Stamps Selected with Great Care by E.L. Pemberton, Esq. Of Birmingham exemplified this approach.

As an advocate of scientific collecting, it was natural that Pemberton would take a keen interest in forgeries and be well equipped to distinguish the fake from the real. In 1863 he wrote, with Thornton Lewes, Forged Stamps: How to Detect Them and with W. Dudley Atlee he started The Spud Papers, a series of regular articles about forgeries that was continued by the Reverend R.B. Earée after Pemberton's death.

In 1872, when John Walter Scott held the first stamp auction in Europe, Pemberton provided one of the first expert reports on the genuineness of two 20 cent St. Louis Postmaster Provisional stamps which were considered by many to be forgeries.

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