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Frank Godden Frank Godden Limited, is a luxury stamp album manufacturer. We share our premises with HH Sales Philatelic Literature Specialists and Publishers. |
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Our Product range includes:
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| About Us
Lewis Sydney Frank Godden died in March 1954 in his 77th year. He had been an eminent professional in the world of philately since the end of the nineteenth century and had served as Commissioner for literally hundreds of British exhibits at various international exhibitions since the First World War. He was made an MBE in 1949 for his services as a representative of Great Britain at these international exhibitions, having been honoured by philately in 1946 when he was asked to sign the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists. The company of Frank Godden Ltd handled many fine collections of classic stamps, including the van Gelder, Bernhard, Waterhouse, and Riesco collections. In the 1920’s & 1930’s their shop in the Strand was one of the focal points for any philatelist. One of Frank Godden’s greatest talents was in the writing up and arrangement of collections and he was employed on numerous occasions to arrange the displays of official archive material exhibited by the British Post Office. He was also employed to prepare many of the displays shown at the British Empire Exhibitions of 1924 and 1925. It was in relation to his presentational skills that his memory lives on to this day. The FG range of albums was, from its first appearance soon after the First World War, acknowledged as among the finest albums ever produced. The current designs show little change from the ones shown in Johannesburg in 1936, where they were awarded a Gold Medal. We believe that there is still no equivalent among albums manufactured today. The current Frank Godden Limited no longer deals in stamps, but it has continued up to the present time as the maker of the highest quality albums, leaves and related materials. Most of its products are still fully or partly hand-made and are designed to last a lifetime. Indeed we are keen buyers of second-hand FG albums and some of these show the Strand address which the company left nearly 35 years ago. Most are still as serviceable now as when they were bought all those years ago. What has changed over the years is the approach of the collector to the conservation of his possessions. With this in mind, our leaves are now made from conservation standard paper. Tissue backing, with its ability to score the surface of the stamps on the following page, gave way to glassine interleaving, but we have now decided to discontinue all forms of faced leaves, on account of the difficulty in obtaining facing material of a sufficient quality and of a type which we could recommend as being archivally safe. Today the most discerning collector does not use such interleaves. He uses unfaced leaves and covers each page in his album with an archival quality polyester protector, or hingeless leaves in the same polyester protectors, kept in a box storage medium rather than the conventional album. Although the albums live on, we have come a long way from the acidic pages with stamps glued to them, that were probably ‘the state of the art’ in Frank Godden’s early days. The current directors’ involvement as owners of Frank Godden
Ltd now spans close to twenty years. As philatelists and historians
we have been hoarding information about the company since it first
started trading, we believe, in 1916. We thought that some of
our customers might like to know some of what we have discovered.
It might also may prompt anyone who knows more to tell us what
they know about the history of a distinguished ‘old time’ philatelist
and his business. |
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