According to a book by Gustav Schenk,* the Count never found peace during his work on the ultimate collection; he must have realised that he could never get it all, and he didn't know enough about his quarry to value them beyond their monetary value. Accordingly, he was preyed on by scam artists who prepared fakes specifically for his visit. These stamps, unique in themselves, are now known as Ferrarities. But there is some evidence he knew what he was doing. He once spent a large amount with a dealer in Berlin, and on his return to Paris he was informed that almost all of his purchases were duds. 'Do you think I had not seen that?' Ferrary is reported as asking. 'The man wanted money badly, and had nothing else, so I had to take the forgeries.' On one occasion he bought an item from the known forgers Benjamin and Sarpy as it was being prepared in the back room.
Ferrary's zeal and compassion hinted at a singular ambition: immortality. 'The philatelic memorial to which I have devoted my entire life', he wrote in his will, 'I bequeath with pride and joy to my beloved German fatherland.' He was writing in the middle of the First World War; he died in 1917. He had once hoped to leave his GB and Colonies stamps to the British Museum, where they would have sat alongside Tapling's, but the war changed his plans. His stamps, which he wished to be known as the Arnold Collection, were seized by the French as war reparations, and auctioned at various sales between 1921 and 1923. The sales provoked feverish bidding, and many items reached record prices. Bidders came from all over the world, attracted not only by the rare lots, but also by the stories attached to them. The total value of the sale was £402,965.
Throughout my new stamp frenzy, it seemed that every publication I picked up had stamps in it. Count Ferrary would have been pleased with The Plot against America, the 2004 novel by Philip Roth, and certainly he would have loved its jacket. This displayed a one-cent stamp with a pleasant green image of Yosemite in California, or it would have been pleasant had it not been overprinted with a heavy black swastika. The novel imagines a scenario in which the isolationist Jew-baiting Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Another nightmare occurs early in the book, when the young male narrator has a dream that his prized set of 1934 National Parks stamps have all been vandalised with the swastika. Earlier in the dream, the portrait of George Washington on a set of stamps had been replaced with that of Adolf Hitler. Stamps are everything for this seven year old; inspired by the widely publicised collecting passions of Roosevelt, he carries his stamp album with him everywhere, much as other children his age carried teddy bears. I had no trouble imagining myself in his shoes.
A short while after reading this I picked up a copy of The New Yorker, and there was a short story by Louise Erdrich called 'Disaster Stamps of Pluto'. Pluto is not the planet (as was), but a backward town in North Dakota. The narrator takes a walk with her friend Neve, who tells her that her uncle Octave, who recently drowned himself in a shallow river, used to collect stamps.
'Do you remember stamp collections?' Neve asks the narrator. 'How important those were? The rage?'
The narrator says that she did remember, and that people still collected stamps.
But Octave was not just any collector. He was the Ferrary of his day, a collector with everything. He kept his stamps in Pluto's bank vault, and it was worth as much as the bank's entire cash stock. He had the tre-skilling banco from Sweden, the British Guiana one-cent magenta, the one-cent Z-Grill—anything monumental in the stamp world, Octave had scaled it, and put it in one of his fifty-nine albums. But that wasn't enough for him. 'My uncle's specialty', Neve explains,'...was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting ... My uncle's melancholia drew him specifically to what are called "errors".'
Yes, Octave collected stamps with missing text and missing colours, but he also collected crash and burn mail—mail that survived big disasters like the Titanic and the Hindenburg and Pompeii. Unfortunately, Octave took it all too far: he began to forge his own disaster mail, and that proved a disaster for Octave. After her uncle's suicide, Neve decided to sell his collection and move to Fargo.
The characters in the short story then discuss the upside-down airplane stamp, the most famous error of all. In 1918, the US Post Office issued a set of three stamps to mark the beginning of its domestic airmail flights. Each of them featured the Curtiss Jenny biplane, but only the twenty-four-cent value was printed in two colours, dark blue (the plane) and carmine (the frame). The two colours required that the sheet of one hundred stamps be pulled through the printer twice, and on one occasion the sheet was passed through the wrong way round, resulting in the 'Jenny' appearing upside down. The man who bought the entire sheet over a post office counter in Washington DC knew the value of this great find immediately, and refused all offers until he found the promise of $15,000 from a business consortium irresistible. The sheet was immediately sold to E. H. R. 'Harry' Green, an obese millionaire with a cork leg who periodically opened the door of his car on New York's Nassau Street and made the dealers come to him. The sheet was long ago split into blocks of four and singles. In May 2002, a collector bought three of the blocks for $2.5 million.
I would go for a drink with friends and someone would mention a stamp book they had read as a child. The poet Ruth Padel said I should look up a novel by Robert Graves—Antigua, Penny, Puce. I was pretty sure she had made a mistake. I knew some of Graves's work, and this didn't sound like his sort of thing at all. Besides, there was no such stamp. But here it is with me now, a book written in Majorca, the one Graves calls his only 'light' novel, about a brother and sister fighting over the ownership of a unique stamp. It is not vintage Graves. It is not even vintage stamp literature, for it crawls along like a heavy Balearic afternoon, not like Bunter or the Brandon thriller. But it does contain one bullseye passage. 'All British schoolboys of a certain age collect postage stamps,' Graves wrote in 1936,
or at least all schoolboys whose parents have a little money; below a certain social level the collecting instinct must, we suppose, be satisfied largely with cigarette pictures and gift-coupons. Schoolgirls, on the other hand ... schoolgirls do not go in for stamp collecting. In fact, they usually despise the pursuit, which is not direct and personal enough to satisfy them emotionally: if they collect anything it is signed photographs of famous actresses and actors. But they have brothers, and brothers collect stamps. So in the holidays they very often consent to lend a hand in the game. They rummage in bedroom drawers, and in their parents' writing-desks, and in boxes in the attic, and sometimes make quite useful hauls. The brothers are touched and gratified. Schoolgirls are not interested in stamps, agreed, but—this is the important point—they are undeniably interested in their brothers' preoccupation with stamps. What is it all about? What is the sense of it?
These are good questions. But the key thing about this passage is the observation that collecting is an instinct. It is not whether one collects, it is what.
Almost everything from my bedside table has gone. Indeed, apart from my first stamp album, almost everything from my bedroom has gone. But how do we agree to these departures? What confident error of forward thinking allows us or our mothers to dispose of childhood property, or secure it in a loft never to be retrieved? How can we tell, at the age of twelve or thirteen, that we will not one day miss these things?
My Dealer
When I returned to stamps in my early forties I found that the market had changed. The Strand was no longer the Mecca of philately, and was unrecognisable from when I had last examined it with a collector's eye. Gibbons and the Strand Stamp Centre were still there, but the weekly Saturday market had gone, along with many traders. A few had retired and sold up, a few had gone bankrupt, and others had just decided to work from home and send catalogues in the post. Then the Internet came along, and they didn't even have to spend postage any more.
One shop that had disappeared was owned by a man named David Brandon. Brandon had opened for business in 1975, and during my first collecting phase I had marvelled at the tre
asures on display. Brandon sold almost everything—GB across all reigns, British Commonwealth, most of the world, albums and many accessories such as watermark and phosphor detectors. The shop was there for eleven years, until Brandon realised that he could do without paying the high property rates and would probably sell just as many stamps to his regular clients via mail order.
To attract new clients, and remind people that he still had a knockout selection of stamps, Brandon now placed advertisements in the monthly magazines. Along with his son, he had developed a new speciality. 'Honesty, Integrity and Confidentiality,' proclaimed one advert in Gibbons Stamp Monthly not long after I had taken up collecting again. 'We believe that these are the three most important words when choosing a dealer to help you build the Great Britain Collection of your desire. Being the world's leading and most active dealers in Important Investment Quality Errors we would be pleased to hear from you, should you care to obtain major pieces such as the items illustrated.' The items illustrated included the Jaguar with the missing Minis, and the Red Cross stamp without the red cross. Another advert appeared in July 2004 announcing another twenty major pieces, ranging from a George VI tete-beche mis-cut booklet pane to the 1967 Wild Flowers with missing agate. Just four sets of this existed, and Brandon had the only complete block of four. According to the advert, the block was last offered for sale by a man called Derek Worboys, and had remained in a private collection ever since. The price was £8,500.
I found the pictures of the stamps irresistible, and so I called up and bought three modest things. I selected the items with great care, and all of them were classic but common stamps I remembered from childhood: 1965 Joseph Lister Discovery Centenary 4d missing brown-red, 1966 British Birds 4d blackbird missing legs, 1966 World Cup is 3d missing blue. This was the beginning: you start small, you like the experience and the product, you get hooked. I had a good conversation with Brandon about prices and great errors, and we hit if off straight away. He knew the area where I lived quite well from his pre-stamp days, and it emerged that we also had a shared interest in the history of the London Underground. Then he did what I considered a remarkable thing: he sent me the stamps I had asked for without first receiving my cheque. It was like getting 'approvals' again, only this time I knew what I was doing, or thought I did. I knew David Brandon was someone I could trust. But he almost certainly knew that by sending me the stamps without prepayment he was establishing an obligation. Three modest errors were never going to be enough. I sent him a cheque for £1,200 immediately, the stamps arrived (in perfect condition, carefully packed between two pieces of stiff corrugated plastic), but I could have received them as a gift, and Brandon still would have profited. You get that at druggy parties—the first hits free and within a week you'd pay anything for more. In that simple three-stamp transaction the error world was pulling me back in.
During one of our conversations, Brandon said I should come down one day if I was ever in the area. I could see no prospect of being in the area at any time, but I really wanted to see more of his stock, and so we fixed a date for lunch. He sent me an email: 'Dress casual, have a relaxing time.'
Before I drove to his place, I bought some more stamps. They were beauties, though not the rarest. I bought a block of four 5d ships from the 1969 issue that sold more than 67 million; mine were missing black, which meant there was no Queen's head, value, hull or inscription, and were four out of seventy-two known. I also got what was technically called a 'wild' perforation on a block of Battle of Britain stamps, which meant that the printed stamps had somehow got caught up in the perforating machine and were cut at unique angles. And then, for £2,000, I bought a horizontal pair of stamps from 1965 that I had been keen on for a while—the ones missing olive-green, the ones without the Post Office Tower.
***
'Value was immaterial to me when I began,' David Brandon told me. 'My plan when I was at school was to have one of every country in the catalogue, but that was when the simplified world catalogue was in one volume not four.' Brandon was sixty-two, small and slender with large glasses, and he was still fond of wearing jeans. He was like no other dealer I had met, in so far as he was someone I wouldn't be nervous about introducing to my friends or my family. He wasn't just into stamps. He also collected London bus and underground maps and tight clothes for his partner Linda on eBay.
He lived and worked on the outskirts of Guildford, Surrey, in a secluded wooded area protected by steel gates and security cameras. His office contained shelves of stamp catalogues and also a large safe with many boxes of breathtaking items. He still deals in stamps from all over the world, but the booming business is in errors.
He explained that when he was growing up in the 1950s every village had a little stamp shop, and everybody collected. 'Everybody,' he told me again, as he knew it would be impossible to believe. Once a week his mother gave him sixpence to buy stamps from his headmaster's office during break-time, and he also bought from a shop near his home in Barnes (he said he could still smell the smoke from the dealer's cigars). He obtained the last stamp to complete his one-stamp-from-every-country-in-the-world collection in 1960, travelling to Bridger & Kay in the Strand to spend £1 5s on an item from Mafeking. Ever since, he's been collecting Boer War.
His father was an executive at Lyon's Bakery, and when he left school at sixteen he worked for Lyon's Ice Cream. By nineteen he was a sales rep, and his earnings went on stamps. Occasionally he would place adverts in the local newspaper offering items he no longer wanted or owned in duplicate, and he found that the techniques he had honed to sell vanilla blocks could be turned effectively to a new trade. At twenty-one he began dealing in stamps from the back office of a newsagent's his father had bought in Putney. He placed adverts in Stamp Collecting Weekly, and soon found that his own collection and dealer's stock became one. 'Occasionally I would advertise something I didn't have,' he told me. 'There was something coming up in auction and I knew that if I could buy it for £20 and sell it for £22 then I couldn't lose. If I couldn't buy it for less than I'd already sold it for I'd just return the money and say, "Sorry, the item's sold." Of course nowadays you're not supposed to do that.'
He stopped doing this not long after meeting a man who advised a merchant bank on alternative investments. From then on he would get telephone calls asking him to buy stamps with other people's money, and he would put a £1,000 portfolio together of classic Canada or Mauritius, making a little profit on the side. 'I was still in my mid-twenties, and nobody knew how I was buying and selling so many stamps,' he said.
His investment friend died in the mid-1970s and his bank was bought, but by then he was already well established at the major London stamp fairs and, with his brother, had converted a dry-cleaner's shop on the Strand. He remembers about forty competing dealers within a few hundred yards, but he had a prime position directly opposite Gibbons. He is still fond of saying, 'No—actually they were opposite me.' He would work hard to get some of Gibbons's trade. 'I don't understand why people bought from them,' he told me, 'unless it was a cheap-ish stamp you just needed to complete a set. But why someone would spend £5,000 on a stamp when they could buy the same stamp from me for £3,500 or £4,000 I don't know—the same quality. There are lots of collectors who believe that because they are buying it from Gibbons it has to be better quality, and of course that's not the case.'
Brandon would spend a portion of every day in his shop disappointing people. Men and women would come in with their stamp albums, or their dead brother's albums, and they thought they might be worth a fortune. Brandon could usually tell what the stamps were worth by the sort of albums they came in. If they were tatty, he would sometimes pretend to weigh them in his left hand and, without even opening the cover, would say, '£20!' Some customers thought he was being serious, and considered the offer with a sigh. Their eyes would lighten a little when Brandon then spent a minute flicking through the pages. Better than he originally thought, he said: £25! The problem was, the inexperienced be
lieved that their stamps were worth what it said in the Stanley Gibbons catalogues, whereas that was merely a top-end selling price, often including a handling charge. The cheap stamps listed in the catalogue at 20p each were actually worth about a penny when you came to sell them. It is only the truly rare stamps that achieve the catalogue price. Every collector learns this lesson early on, and then they have to make a decision. Do they throw it all in as a waste of time and money, or do they persevere? The true collectors persevere, because they are in love. I gave up my hobby for about twenty-five years, but when it came looking for me again I was helpless.
The Error World Page 6
