In poor health, he retired early from the leather trade and began to collect postage stamps.

[1] His father had started in the dry goods business before making a fortune in the leather industry, to which he was introduced by his father-in-law, and later in cattle importing.

[2][3] Thorne was active in the family business but retired early, possibly due to ill health.

Soon feeling, however, that the lack of a hobby was contributing to the decline in his health, which was never good, he quickly restarted, collecting nothing but unused blocks of four of the stamps of the twentieth century.

[7] Thorne died on January 19, 1907, "after a painful illness"[4] and a third operation on his throat that Charles J. Phillips of Stanley Gibbons Monthly Journal thought was probably caused by cancer.