Maurice Burrus

Maurice Jean Marie Burrus (8 March 1882 – 5 December 1959)

He was educated at Dole, in the Collège Stanislas de Paris and later in Hanover where he studied banking and learnt German before returning to Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines where he took over the running of the family tobacco factory. He also travelled to the United States, Canada, Mexico and Asia Minor.

Later life During World War I his anti-German sentiment was displayed by refusing to supply the German armies with tobacco, an act that got him a prison sentence of eight months and exiled from Alsace where his property was seized and sold.

Philately The "Bordeaux Cover", bought in 1934 by Burrus at the Hind auction, with Mauritius 1d Orange-red and the 2d Deep Blue "Post Office" stamps. Auctioned for CHF 5,750,000 in 1993 by David Feldman. Burrus began to collect stamps at the age of seven after old family mail found in their attics spurred his interest.

In collecting, Burrus was a completist and he had the funds to allow him to be so. In a 1922 issue of The Philatelic Magazine he suggested that a collector's aim was:

to reassemble the whole of the stamps issued in one country, in a certain part of the world, or if possible, of the whole universe, and not to estimate the value of stamps according to their beauty of engraving or design. In 1923 he acquired the only complete known unused sheet of 20 of the 1850 “Dreier Sachsen” (Saxony) stamps previously in the collection of Philipp von Ferrary and sold it prior to the rest of his collection being sold around 1964. Burrus had acquired about a quarter of Ferrary's collection. By the time of his death in 1959, he owned five copies of the Mauritius "Post Office" stamp. and in 1955 he was invited to sign the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists. In the same year Life magazine wrote that in their opinion, he had one of the three "truly great stamp collections worldwide in scope". He was commemorated in 1968 by the Liechtenstein post office when he was one of five notable collectors included on a set of stamps issued that year. The liquidator contracted Robson Lowe to dispose of the Burrus material between 1962 and 1964.