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The Error World: An Affair with Stamps

The Error World: An Affair with Stamps
By Mr. Simon Garfield

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Product Description

From the author of Mauve, an obsessively readable memoir that brings the mania for stamp collecting to life From the Penny Red to the Blue Mauritius, generations of collectors have been drawn to the mystique of rare stamps.
Once a widespread pastime of schoolboys, philately has increasingly become the province of older men obsessed with the shrewd investment, the once-in-a-lifetime find, the one elusive beauty that will complete a collection and satisfy an unquenchable thirst.
As a boy, Simon Garfield collected errors—rare pigment misprints that create ghostly absences in certain stamps.
When this passion reignited in his mid-forties, it consumed him. In the span of a couple of years he amassed a collection of errors worth upwards of forty thousand pounds, pursuing not only this secret passion, but a romantic one as his marriage disintegrated.
In this unique memoir, Simon Garfield twines the story of his philatelic obsession with an honest and engrossing exploration of the rarities and absences that both limit and define us.The end result is a thoughtful, funny, and enticing meditation on the impulse to possess.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #111446 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-01-20
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 256 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review

PRAISE FOR MAUVE

"Garfield has surpassed himself with his new subject matter: Mauve elegantly relates the tale of Victorian chemist William Perkin who, in 1856, failed to make quinine from coal tar but discovered instead how to synthesize the colour purple. Fascinating stuff."—Esquire

"This engaging and airy history shows how the development of mauve, the first mass-produced artificial dye, ignited a 19th-century revolution . . . Garfield has inspired me to wear a bit of mauve this spring to honour this inventive man."—The New York Times

About the Author

SIMON GARFIELD is a feature writer at the Observer (London) and the author of nine works of nonfiction, including Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The End of Innocence, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1995.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Perfect Stamp

Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out.

It is almost one o’clock on 22 November 2006, a Wednesday. I’m standing just inside the door of my marriage guidance counsellor’s house in north London. I have a stamp album under my arm and I am in all kinds of trouble – emotional, financial, philatelic – a situation I couldn’t have imagined two years before.

My marriage is over, but the reasons are still unravelling.

We have drifted apart over the years. I have fallen in love and I’m having an affair. I have developed a passion for someone I loved when I was young, and for something I loved when I was a child. I am forty-seven, and I can’t concentrate on anything for very long.

I have built up a stamp collection I can barely afford, and it has brought me to the brink of ruin. The affair and my stamps, the two secrets that have brought me here to a small room in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, are not unconnected, for both are quests for meaning, the classic mid-life dilemma. For my marriage guidance counsellor the affair is a commonplace: a lack of intimacy and honesty with my wife, a beautiful woman who has rejuvenated my days and made me feel attractive, hotel rooms. But the stamps are something unusual.

Collecting fills a hole in a life, and gives it a semblance of meaning. When men get together to talk about their passions, we don’t just talk about what we love – our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings – but also how much these desires have cost us, and what we have lost. We try to regain what we cannot. We talk about the one that got away – the prized possession – as if that would have made everything right.

Little do wives know: I first heard this phrase from Michael Sefi, the keeper of the Queen’s stamps. Then there were similar observations from the head of an auction house and my stamp dealer. They often spun a web of secrets for their clients, something they called discretion. My philatelic icon, a man who had the heroic name Sir Gawaine Baillie, had built up a collection worth more than ten million pounds, but his wife thought it was worth £800,000.

In the past I have wondered whether my affair was a sort of hobby too, a diversion from reality, a club of extreme enthusiasm. We loved talking about our love, and would sometimes talk of nothing else, shutting out the world with our own code. We knew it wasn’t harmless, and that devastating and far-reaching things would surely follow, but we considered ourselves above life itself.

I found it easier to talk about my affair than my stamps. I was actually proud of it, even in front of my wife. In my mid-forties I could still ignite passion in myself and in another; better, it was a passion I had never felt before. And anyone could understand these emotions, the stuff of books and films, and of a million lucky lives. But stamps? Used postage? Who could be passionate about that? And who could explain it?

I told my wife of my affair in a straightforward way, on a walk along the Kent coast one afternoon, and things moved swiftly from there. Within a week I was sleeping in my office, within a month in a rented flat. There is a practical way these things advance, a clinical order to offset the hurt and anger and tears. There is professional help to call upon. But an affair with stamps – stamps as a mistress, just as uncontrollable as the wildest edge of obsessive love – that might take half a lifetime to understand.

My wife still doesn’t appreciate my stamps, but my marriage guidance counsellor, who I shall call Jenny, is making a good attempt. After our session this lunchtime I have an appointment at an auction house, not to buy but to sell, a meeting that will place a monetary value on my private hobby, which in turn will affect my immediate future and the level of extended mortgages and maintenance payments. Rather than leave my stamps in my car I have brought them in, and I am opening the cover for Jenny to examine.

She is bored out of her mind in less than thirty seconds. She doesn’t even feign interest. I say, ‘Look at this one, it lacks olive-green!’ She says, ‘I know they mean a lot to you.’

I don’t collect ordinary stamps. I collect stamps with errors, with absent colours, with printing faults. It doesn’t take long for my marriage guidance counsellor to make the connection between what I collect – stamps with bits missing – and my family history, which has been a life with people missing. I mention to her that Freud considered collecting as ‘compensation for loss’, and she nods. She doesn’t understand the beauty of the stamps in my album, but she can see that selling them is a great loss, another imminent separation.

 

First U.S. edition

© Simon Garfield, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Customer Reviews

I fail to see how this man's life is interesting.3
Without meaning to be cruel, I do marvel at the conceit of people who because they've had some success believe that a record of their lives is somehow interesting, and I mean really interesting. Interesting in the "I'm gonna write a book that is all about me" sort of way and not in the "h'mmm, now that's interesting" sort of way that one might feel upon seeing a newly issued postage stamp, for instance.
I realize that a majority of us feel about ourselves that we are special and nuanced and possibly worthy of adulation. At the same time however we are sane enough to recognize that pretty much nobody leads a life that cries out to be auto-memorialized because we comprehend that all but a teeny tiny fraction of people bob around the statistical line known as average.
Some people should write autobiographies because their lives have been truly extraordinary, or because they lived through and helped to shape certain historical events that had tremendous effects upon a people or country or science, and above all have led inordinately interesting lives. For instance, Charles Manson should write an autobiography, Mao Tse Tung should have, the Founding Fathers of the United States might have. President and General U.S. Grant did. Thomas Edison's autobiography might have been fascinating. Voltaire's was predictably scandalous, the Marquis De Sade's scurrilous. Sei Shonagon's was too brief as was Geronimo's. Robinson Crusoe's was brilliant if a bit contrived.
You get the message though: Only certain classes of people should write autobiographies.

Mr. Garfield is not in them, any of them. Although he seems a likable enough chap his life and interest in stamps aren't compelling enough to hold one's interest for very long, certainly not for the length of a book (and this book really isn't about collecting, it's about Mr. Garfield). On the other hand, if he'd been able to amass a world-class stamp collection that involved him in possible skullduggery or, say, having to first trek through the jungles of Borneo to take possession of a particularly rare species of orchid in order to make the trade. Alas, nothing of the sort took place, at least not in Garfield's world. All he did was cheat on his wife; spend prodigious amounts of money building a postage stamp collection; and then snag a writing contract as a means to, among other things, ultimately profit from his otherwise injudicious behaviour.
I believe this to be a weak premise for an autobiographical story poorly told. I believe it would have been interesting in a much truncated version as an article in The New Yorker.

A stamp collector's memoirs - who thought that was a good idea?3
This book isn't so much a book about stamp collecting as it is a personal memoir written by a guy who collects stamps. And as interesting as I find stamp collecting (been doing it for 37 years), and despite having much in common with the author (almost same age, lived in England, shopped at the same stamp shops, etc.), I didn't find this book nearly as interesting as I thought I would. Occasionally, some of the anecdotes are rather amusing and insightful, such as when relating his personal relationships with esoteric stamp dealers (which provide curious and minute details into the inner workings of the hobby of stamp collecting), but other times, the stories and memories are simply tedious (such as when he relates his feelings about reading fiction involving stamps and collectors when he was a boy). One strength of the book is the analysis of collecting in general that the author provides. It's a mentality I can relate to, and I enjoyed those sections of the book, but then again, it's not wholly related to the title and ostensible theme of the book. Thankfully, the author has some skills, so the book is well-written and interesting enough, but while it tried to target stamp collectors, I don't think it is tightly themed enough to retain the attention of casual collectors, and certainly not non-collectors. Friends, family, and acquaintances and interviewees of the author may find it more interesting, but that is a narrower circle still. This book will appeal to some people, but if you are not a stamp collector or really into memoirs, you are not one of those "some people", and you are likely to be as bored as the idea of a stamp collector's memoir suggests you will be.

Interesting look at UK stamp collecting4
In the 70s, my parents attempted to get me involved in stamp collecting. Figuring it would be a good way for an overly hyperactive child to pass the time, they purchased a bag of cheap stamps and an album for me to play with. I spent a few lazy, rainy Sundays looking at stamps and trying to match them to the images of the book, but collecting never took my fancy, and I resorted to playing with my Star Wars action figures not long after.

Error World is a memoir about one man's passion for collecting error stamps. Simon Garfield began collecting as a child, his passion spilling out into stamp collecting novels and catalogs, first issues and magazines. When his parents died, he gave up his hobby, only to take it up again when midlife crisis set in, and his marriage was beginning to fall apart. His hobby was his passion, and his secret, his affair costly. His marriage dissolved when he had another affair of the extramarital kind; the divorce required that he sell of his collection.

What begins as a memoir turns out to be a rather interesting history of British stamps (they invented the whole thing, after all), famous errors, and the passion of collecting. The book is a little weak when it crosses outside of the stamp collecting circle to explain why people collect, but overall it's an interesting historical and cultural look at a dying passion.

As someone who never really participated in this hobby, I wasn't sure if I'd like the book or not, but I did. I found it intriguing and wondered if I was perhaps missing out on something by not partaking. But I think this book will really be enjoyed by those who participate in collecting, rather than people like me. It's a good read, regardless.