Henry Ellis Harris

American philatelist and stamp dealer

Henry Ellis Harris (January 21, 1902 – December 29, 1977), commonly known as H. E. Harris, was an American philatelist and stamp dealer who through his company, H. E. Harris & Co., popularized philately for many Americans, especially children.

Harris was born in Atlanta in 1902. At age 14, while living in Washington, D. C., he began his stamp career. Over the years, advertisements by H. E. Harris, which offered a quantity of stamps for a small amount of money (usually less than $1) on the condition that additional stamps were sent on approval, became ubiquitous in many magazines and comic books. The company developed a fully illustrated postage stamp catalog that sold for a fraction of the cost of the more detailed Scott Stamp Catalogue.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) sponsored the radio show Ivory Stamp Club of the Air during the Great Depression. The show was hosted by "Captain Tim" Healy, a former officer in the Australian Army, world traveler, and raconteur. H. E. Harris was contracted by P&G to send each new club member a stamp album, badge and packet of stamps in exchange for an Ivory soap wrapper. To receive more stamp packets, members could send two soap wrappers and 10¢. When the last show was broadcast in 1936, the club had 2.5 million members. Many of them became Harris customers and helped build the company into one of the largest stamp businesses in the world. had started selling stamps to various local drug, novelty, and variety stores while still in elementary school.

Harris gained media attention in 1962 when he went to court to prevent the Canal Zone and the United States Post Office Department from issuing large quantities of intentional error stamps to destroy the value of a few stamps that had reached circulation honoring the opening of the Thatcher Ferry Bridge (now the Bridge of the Americas) but lacking the silver ink used to depict the bridge. Harris had acquired some of the error stamps, and claimed that the issuance, which would reduce the value of the error stamps to a few cents each, violated his rights. He was successful in his lawsuit, for which he received the Luff Award from the American Philatelic Society in 1966 for exceptional contributions to philately.

In 1975, Harris sold his business to the venture capital arm of General Mills, which discontinued the stamps on approval mail order service. Harris died in 1977 at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. In 1979, Harris was posthumously elected to the American Philatelic Society Hall of Fame. In 2003, H. E. Harris & Co. consolidated with Whitman Coin Products, becoming Whitman Publishing.