Philately is not just about collecting stamps and sticking them into albums. There is a sociable side to the hobby as well. Of course, it is perfectly possible to collect stamps in splendid isolation, bidding by post (and now on the web as well) or obtaining new issues by mail order, but man is a gregarious animal and half the fun of any hobby is in meeting other like-minded individuals.

Canada, a country which used to be prone to postal slogans with an off-beat flavour, had a slogan some years ago which read SAVE STAMPS FOR SHUT-INS, meaning that this was a pastime that was ideally suited to people who were chronically ill and were confined to bed. Well, there's even a world-wide club for philatelists who live in remote, isolated places or are housebound on account of illness. The Lone Collectors' Club, as it is called, does its best to maintain contacts among its members and even link them to active philatelists who can spare a little time to visit and help to foster the hobby.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to have been one of the pioneers of the hobby. Back in the early 1850s, when stamp-collecting was in its infancy, the relatively few devotees were probably regarded by their peers as eccentric, if not quite mad. But as the virus spread, stamp-collecting became commonplace. Edward Stanley Gibbons, born in the same year as the Penny Black, began dealing in stamps in 1856 in a corner of his father's pharmacy in Plymouth and references to the hobby, and advertisements for stamps, were becoming more frequent in newspapers and magazines by that time.

By the mid-1850s schoolboys and office clerks in the City of London were meeting in Birchin Lane in their lunch hour to buy, sell or swap stamps, and such large crowds eventually congregated there that the police had to move in and disperse them. In Paris, Amsterdam, Prague and other large cities on the European continent large open-air bourses and swapmeets developed without interference and continue to this day, but in Britain stamp collectors were, if not forced underground, certainly forced indoors.

In the 1860s collectors used to meet on Saturday afternoons at the Rectory, All Hallows Staining. The Dickensian sound of the name is hardly surprising, for it actually features in the novel Dombey and Son. Here the good rector held court over his cronies who included Charles Viner, editor of the Stamp Collectors Magazine, Mount Brown, publisher of one of the earliest catalogues, Judge Philbrick and Sir Daniel Cooper, who became President of the Philatelic Society, London when it was founded in 1869.

A club had been formed in Paris four years previously but it did not last long, whereas the London society, now the Royal Philatelic Society, is still in existence and if not the biggest is certainly the most prestigious in the world.

Nowadays philately is so often perceived as a male pursuit, and it seems rather sad that most stamp clubs have only a token lady member or two at most. When the hobby began it had numerous female adherents - indeed, the earliest references to it in magazines infer that it was mainly a pastime for young ladies. Several women featured prominently in the early history of the hobby, including Charlotte Tebay who helped organise the earliest London philatelic exhibitions and Adelaide Lucy Fenton who was a prolific writer in the stamp magazines - but like certain lady novelists of an earlier generation, she preferred to write under the masculine pen name of Herbert Camoens.

The English School was noted for its general approach to philately, whereas the French School had a more scientific bent. They paid greater attention to the minute variations in their stamps and it was one of them, Dr Jacqus Amable Legrand, who invented the perforation gauge in 1866 and wrote the earliest treatise on watermarks a year later. The Germans, Italians and other Europeans followed the French, whereas the Americans followed the English style, but by the 1870s the two had merged and philately had developed into the exact science we know today.

Stamp collecting went through a sticky patch in the 1870s (the Stamp Collectors Magazine was forced into oblivion in 1874 for lack of support) but somehow the hobby managed to weather the doldrums and by the 1880s had gained such an international influence that it was possible to stage the first exhibitions open to collectors from many countries.

In Britain, such cities as Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol were flourishing centres of stamp dealing, but gradually the larger dealers gravitated towards the metropolis and by the end of the century London was very much the centre of the stamp world. Interestingly, there seems to have been a trend in the opposite direction in recent years. To be sure, there are still a few auction houses in London but Sandafayre is not the only major undertaking located in what Londoners refer to as 'the provinces' and there are many others up and down the land. The stamp trade is now much more evenly spread, thanks to the methods of buying and selling, by mail order or on-line, using credit cards to facilitate transactions.

High rents and rates have hit retail stamp dealing very hard. When I was a boy there were at least half a dozen stamp shops in Glasgow alone; today there is barely that number in the whole of Scotland. The Strand in London was a philatelic mecca with dozens of dealers within a radius of a mile. As overheads rose in the 1960s the solution seemed to be for dealers to band together and create an emporium such as the Strand Stamp Centre located in a disused cinema. The Rue Drouot in Paris, the Rosmarinsteeg in Amsterdam and Nassau Street in New York are still thoroughfares where stamp shops are clustered, but everywhere else the trade has been scattered to the four winds.

Their place has been largely taken by the stamp fairs which had their origin in philatelic exhibitions at which dealers took stands. Exhibitions have been organised at local, regional, national and international level for well over a century now. Originally they were little more than shows at which philatelists exhibited their collections competitively, but by the early 1900s the dealers' booths and stalls were becoming the main attraction and so it has continued to the present day, in which the purely exhibition aspect is often of secondary importance, if it is included at all. The first British Philatelic Exhibitions in the 1960s, organised by Robson Lowe (himself a leading auctioneer), had no stamp dealers at all, but within a year or two the BPE was obliged to admit them in order to attract collectors.

Exhibitions at a local level used to be annual affairs, but in the late 1960s the first fair circuits began to emerge. Enterprising dealers would organise a dozen or more fellow dealers and stage one-day fairs in various towns and cities on a regular basis, usually once a month. The fair circuit might last a week or ten days but it covers a wide area and enables collectors to meet dealers face to face and browse through their stock, find things they might never have dreamed of asking a postal trader or those unconsidered trifles which turn out to be terrific bargains. From the dealer's viewpoint the stamp fair not only gives him a marvellous opportunity to meet new customers and renew acquaintance with established clients, but also to purchase material from collectors and other dealers. In bygone times most collectors would have frequented their friendly neighbourhood dealer but the freshness and variety of the stock available would have diminished. Now, however, you can visit a stamp fair and examine the material offered by a large number of dealers, both general and specialised, with postal history and thematics catered to as well. Moreover, as stamp fairs tend to draw large crowds, this is also where you bump into old friends. I might add that I joined the three clubs of which I am currently a member as a result of contacts made at stamp fairs - but that's a story that must wait till next month.