Från dödsrunan i The Economist för Whitney Smith – vexilloligins uppfinnare:
Dropping out of academic life at the age of 30 to become the world’s first and only full-time vexillologist, Mr Smith became, he happily admitted, a “monomaniac”. He took no holidays, worked seven days a week, eschewed television for a single radio, living alone after both his marriages ended in divorce. The Flag Research Centre, which he founded in 1962, was based in his 16-room house in Winchester, Massachusetts, crammed with 11,000 books on flags—more than in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard University and the British Museum combined, he reckoned. It also contained a huge card-catalogue and (in dehumidified storage), 4,000 flags. The Corpus Vexillorum Mundi, as he called it, involved the collection, presentation and description of every national flag that has ever flown.