But stamps have always had other values beyond the speculative or the postal. In lovers' hands they are secret codes. In the last few years, letters between troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and loved ones at home would occasionally carry stamps placed on envelopes at unusual angles. A stamp stuck on upside down would often mean: 'My world is upside down without you.' A stamp at a strange angle might signify a kiss. Email, often censored, found it hard to compete with these tactile emotions. The stamp may also conceal a secret message beneath it.
But this is nothing new. Before stamps, as Rowland Hill recognised in his first pamphlet, the paying recipient of a letter could save money by refusing to pay the charge upon delivery, gleaning all they needed to know from the coded markings on the envelope. After 1840, Victorian lovers used the tilting of a stamp to convey elaborate messages, particularly on postcards where only public emotions could be expressed. The less imaginative could buy a preprinted deciphering card to decode the lexicon. Different languages had different translations: in English a stamp tilted to the left often meant 'Will you be mine?', but in German this was read as 'Why don't you reply?'
In June 2007, 167 years since the Penny Black first made history, it made history again. William H. Gross, the supremely wealthy chief executive at the bond investment company Pimco, sold a mint block of twenty-four Penny Blacks for $1 million at auction. The block was actually two blocks—one a block of eighteen stamps, the largest in private hands, running six across and three down, and the other a strip of six stamps that ran along the bottom of that block. The stamps were 'reunited' in the late 1990s, and are as perfect an example of the issue as one could hope to find, with excellent colour, almost full gum and great margins, the left-hand margin of the large block bearing the lettering '...ICE id per label 1/- Per Row of 12. £1. Per Sheet. Plac...'. The bottom block added a 'PR...' to the beginning of the inscription, and had the sheet been even bigger the instructions to those who found the use of stamps novel, which was everyone, would have continued '...e the Labels ABOVE the Address and towards the RIGHT HAND SIDE of the Letter. In Wetting the Back be careful not to remove the Cement.'
William H. Gross was selling his line-engraved Great Britain collection to benefit Médecins Sans Frontières, and after the auction, which raised a total of $9.1 million, he said that he had only bought some of the items in the sale over the last few years, often at one-quarter of the price they had just realised. It was a further example of the huge prices now being paid for the very best material, a boom that was reflected in the art market and was driven by the influx of new money from Russia and the Far East. I liked what I had read about Gross a great deal. I admired his collection and his generosity, but I also appreciated his story, which was like mine on a grander scale. He had collected as a boy, given it up for real life, and then took it up again in his late forties as a way 'to reconnect with my childhood'. He was clearly a canny investor, and the person who appears to have taught him most was his mother. She taught him what not to do. She had bought mint sheets from the post office in the misguided hope that they would increase in value, just as I had done when I was young. But the stamps his mother gave Bill Gross were, even after several years, hardly worth face value. So now he invested in great rarity, and almost every major purchase he made was paying off.
I was fascinated by the sale of the Penny Blacks. Even a reproduction of the blocks in the catalogue displayed a richness and softness that summoned me back to the Dickensian post office, and I could see the haircut of the postmaster and his scissors slicing the sheet, and I wanted to rub my index finger over the chalky surface. Old stamps, especially line-engraved, have the power to transport the collector to a place in their childhood and far beyond; we remember where we were when we first saw a Penny Black and learnt of its lore from our fathers or at school, and even if we soon acquire a cheap one with poor margins and a heavy cancellation, and look at it for a lifetime, the appeal never lessens and the link with the beginning of our hobby is permanent. I have a Penny Black bought for £23 in 1976 in a small wallet-size album covered with fake green alligator-style vinyl. It is not a beautiful stamp, is not worth dramatically more than when I bought it, but it links me with a past that links all stamp people. (I have a pair of Twopenny Blues as well, finer examples and just as old and worth more, but they don't sing in the same way.) I never felt a strong sense of community with other collectors. Some form lifelong friendships at stamp clubs and monthly societies, but I was always terrified of revealing myself and being exposed; enthusiasm would probably have pulled me through, but everyone at these places seemed far older than me and their hair had oil and multiple partings, and I felt older just by looking at the list of names of honorary members, the Thwaites, the Festidges, the Belfrages. But for me the Penny Black was club membership at the highest level. Whatever else was happening around me—the family disintegrations, pressures of exams and then work, romantic complications—here was a comforting and reliable constant. It was flat, stowable, secret. Stamps seldom disappointed and never left you. My first meagre Penny Black is the only one I want from that time. I had never had the strong urge to buy a better one, or to expand to the later high-values (not that I could have afforded to). I have a particular love for the Jubilee set issued between 1887 and 1900, an explosion of colour and elaboration in carmine, rose, purple, green, scarlet, yellow and vermilion. But the feeling I get when I examine my Penny Black with its heavy black Maltese Cross cancellation is something that runs sideways through my veins, fizzing off the lining. It has something to do with being first—the first adhesive stamp issued, the first famous stamp in my album, one of the first of those great British inventions that would soon be thought useful throughout the world, like gas masks or the internal combustion engine. I felt proud when I saw that block of twenty-four go for $1 million in America. But goodness knows what Rowland Hill would have felt.
And just when I was considering the possibility of moving from errors into line-engraved Victorian, I received an email from Mark Brandon suggesting I should think again. It was not a personal email, but it seemed to be speaking directly to me. 'Dear Collector,' it began,
We have recently purchased in its entirety the world-renowned 'Jalapa Collection' of modern British Errors. This collection is basically COMPLETE to include all known missing colour and imperforate errors up to the year 2000 and was formed, with the help of ourselves, by an old client and friend over the past forty or so years.
Due to the vast scale of the holding we shall be gradually adding gems from this sensational collection over the forthcoming months to our website (first selection just uploaded under new items) and we invite you to view these at http://www.stamperrors.com.
We will, of course, have the entire holding at Stampex in February and invite clients to come and view these at our booth. In the meantime, please advise us of any specific 'wants' for that elusive error.
Kind regards,
Mark Brandon
This was a sensation, because collection is basically COMPLETE! have.
I wrote back immediately.
Hi Mark,
How exciting!
I'm still in the market for the Parliamentary Conference is 3d missing blue if you want to quote me a price on it...(presumably it's in a strip?).
Would love to find out more about Jalapa's collecting stories. Would you ask him if he'd be willing to talk now that he's sold? as Mark Brandon wrote, the There was one stamp I had to Hope all's well with you. I'm going to see your father again at the end of this week ...
Best,
Simon
At 8.31 the following day:
Hi Simon,
Great to hear from you.
Although the collection is virtually complete it, sadly, does not contain the Parliamentary strip ... I did have one a few years ago but I managed to persuade the owner to part with it so that I could sell it on to another client.
I will certainly ask him if he would be prepared to share his collect
ing stories with you, please leave this one with me.
All the very best,
Mark
Almost Blue
In 2000, at a dinner to honour the Chelsea FA Cup-winning team of 1970, held at a Top London Hotel, I sat next to a man from the Franklin Mint who told me about the heirlooms to be treasured by your children and your children's children. Most of this crap was rolling off production lines in China: Victorian dolls, special editions of Monopoly and Scrabble, Coronation Street plates. My dinner companion was an honest man: he told me that they could be enjoyed by their recipients, but they could not be relied upon to increase in value. In fact, the opposite would most certainly be true, and as soon as they were removed from their packaging they would be worth only irony dollars. 'Someone actually bought this when it was new!' you could say as you spotted it at kitsch.com years later. 'I must add it to my collection.'
When the Chelsea dinner was over I went around the top table collecting autographs from Peter Bonetti ('Could you sign it Peter "The Cat" Bonetti?' I asked him. 'I'll sign it anything you like,' he said), John Dempsey, Marvin Hinton, Chopper Harris and Peter Osgood. Alan Hudson was due to be there too, but he had just been run over. They wrote their names on my photo of the triumphant team posing with the FA Cup, and a week later I had it framed and hung it on the wall outside my office. I thought it was a collectable. When Peter Osgood died five years later it became even more of one.
The photo hangs a few feet away from two large dark-blue cabinets containing about six hundred Chelsea lapel badges. These are made of scrap metal and coloured enamel, and it is clearly a collection that has got out of hand. I had a few in a box from when I used to go to Chelsea with my father, and I bought a few at the first big games I went to with my own children, and then something suddenly kicked in and we were buying everything we could from the stands outside the ground and collectors' fairs and eBay. Many badges featured individual players: 'Chopper Bites Yer Legs'; 'Osgood Is Good.'
Had he died a few years before, Peter Osgood's death would have made him eligible, indeed likely, to appear on a stamp. Up until the end of the twentieth century there was a formal understanding that, with the exception of royalty, no living person could be remembered in this way. It was seen as disrespectful, and possibly confusing; because stamps were traditionally linked with commemoration and anniversaries, the public might assume a person was dead just because they appeared on one. After the war there was mild clamour for Churchill to appear on a stamp, but the governmental postal committee decided that it was best to wait until he was dead.
Occasionally, there were errors. Roger Taylor, drummer with Queen, appeared in the background of a stamp celebrating the life of Freddie Mercury, who had died a few years earlier. There were letters of disquiet from smart Alecs in the philatelic press, but no one else seemed to mind, and shortly afterwards the rules were relaxed. These days anyone can appear on a stamp so long as they are commercial enough. So we have had half the English cricket team celebrating the Ashes, and at the beginning of 2007 we had the Beatles, including surviving members Paul and Ringo, being issued in eight different ways, and proving the most popular stamps the Royal Mail has printed apart from commemoratives with royals.
John Lennon would have been pleased: he was a stamp collector when he was young. In fact, his album, a green 'Mercury', suggests his schoolboy collection was almost as poor and erratic as mine. On 145 pages there were scattergun accumulations of GB, as well as India, Australia and Canada, places he would have had no realistic expectation of visiting, not least as a demigod. Or perhaps there were already vague intimations: he had practised his signature on several pages. There was also his address: 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, Liverpool. The album is worth rather more than mine. When it came up for sale in May 2005 at Fraser's Autographs (a sister company to Stanley Gibbons), it was described as 'a wonderful item ... in very good condition, with scattered light toning and soiling to the signed page, worn but intact front cover spine and expected age and handling wear from a stamp collector'. When it was put on show to prospective purchasers, it was pointed out that even at an early age, Lennon was 'displaying a love of drawing'. He had demonstrated this by drawing a beard on stamps with the King and a moustache on the Queen. What was not mentioned was the fact that some of the stamps appeared to be attached to the album with heavy glue. The stamps on their own were worth about £3, but the album's provenance ensured an asking price of £29,950.
Freddie Mercury also collected when he was still Farrokh Bulsara in India. He was keenest between the ages of nine and twelve, with a particular interest in Great Britain, Aden, Monaco and Zanzibar, his birthplace. His collecting level can best be described as 'artistic', for he collected on unusual black album pages and designed his displays with great care for symmetry and colour. On one page he had used GB stamps to spell out the letter 'F'. He lost interest long before he became famous, but his album was looked after by his father, himself a keen collector of Zanzibar fiscals (government tax stamps). * Two years after Freddie Mercury's death in 1991, his father put both his own and his son's collections up for auction at Sotheby's.
His son's lot raised £3,320 plus VAT plus commission, purchased by the Royal Mail for the National Postal Museum. The album was then exhibited, and young philatelists and Queen fans were encouraged to do something they had not been allowed to do to any stamp album before: touch it. In fact, they received a certificate stating they had both viewed and touched the Mercury album, and Stamp Magazine reported that 825 people had received certificates during 1994. After the National Postal Museum closed down in 1998, Mercury's album went on tour to the World Philatelic Exhibition in Melbourne, where it was displayed in the Court of Honour and reportedly seen by more people than pages from the collection owned by the Queen.
For a while I made a habit of asking famous people I interviewed if they collected stamps.
Madonna: 'No! What makes you ask?'
John Terry: 'Stamps, no.' His thing was watches: 'This is a Rolex Daytona,' he said as he flashed his wrist. 'For winning the league I treated myself to a Franck Muller.'
Pete Townshend: 'I did collect stamps, yes, until I was about twelve, I think. Not brilliantly well, but I loved doing it.'
Not brilliantly well: this is how I would rate my own early philatelic health. I have one large cardboard box that once contained Clementines from Spain and now houses all my philatelic passions from the ages of six to eighteen. It begins with torn stamps in the Stanley Gibbons Gay Venture album and ends with entire mint sheets preserved between stiff card, and in between is a sample of almost every collecting fad and gimmick the Royal Mail issued. Once I hoped these would have future value; now I wonder at my naivety and endless enthusiasm for gutter pairs, traffic-light blocks, miniature sheets, first-day covers, presentation packs, PHQ cards, booklets, year packs and exhibition souvenirs. I was grabbing at everything, the way one does when one is amassing rather than collecting, the way one hoards without knowledge. The Royal Mail marketing team absolutely adored me.
There are many written guides on how to collect stamps, some more patronising than others. My favourite was published in 1926 by C. F. Dendy Marshall, a Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society and then owner of a valuable collection of early Victorian issues, including many proofs and essays. 'The first desideratum of a collection is that it should be more than a mere accumulation,' Dendy Marshall instructs. 'If the purse permits, and opportunity offers, it should commence with essays, proofs, documents dec. A frontispiece, not necessarily philatelic, may be quite an attraction, if well chosen, such as, for Great Britain, an engraving of the Wyon Guildhall medal.' Later on, Dendy Marshall advises: 'There are two practices, formerly more common than at present, which have done an immense amount of harm, and cannot be too strongly condemned. One consists of tearing off the margins of unused stamps which were at the edge of the sheet, the other of soaking or steaming used stamps off the paper.' The loss of margins reduced value and the ability to
imagine the stamp on the original sheet, while the soaking and steaming often damaged the stamp and reduced evidence of postmarks.
'The next important question that arises relates to the number of stamps that are required, which of course depends on the extent to which variation is to be recognised. Many collections contain numbers of stamps which are really nothing but duplicates of one another, especially if the owner is well off, in which case the temptation to accumulate rarities is often apparently irresistible.' Dendy Marshall railed against collecting stamps in larger multiples than a strip of three or a block of four, complaining of how 'the power of a long purse' may deprive other collectors. His last pointer concerned the selection of album. In 1926 he found it useful to have his handmade in large oblong form, one hundred sheets to the album. Do not put too many sheets into one album, he warned, for the stamps will get rubbed.
My first album is in a terrible state. It barely has a cover, let alone a frontispiece, and there are far too many sheets in it, some of them empty, some of them so full that there is not a sign of yellowing album page. Stamps are piled on top of each other. All the stamps have been separated from their margins and soaked off their original backing. Some of them have, alarmingly, been glued in (I can't believe I did this myself, but who else would have had the chance?). There are stamps from places no one I know has ever visited, originating in sample packs from WHSmith or from charity appeals described in magazine adverts as 'missionary sacks'. The rest of my stamp box contains large quantities of duplicates and much futility. There are entire sheets of the 3½p value from the 1973 wedding of Princess Anne to Mark Phillips, and a half-sheet from the 1974 of the 10p British Trees Horse Chestnut. There are albums of first-day covers addressed in my terrible teenage handwriting, many 'presentation packs' (the stamps issued in a plastic envelope with information about their history and design) and 'PHQ' postcards (official Post Office enlargements) of stamps celebrating Sailing and European Architectural Heritage Year (1975). There are also cigar boxes with small collections of marbles and sew-on patches with slogans such as 'Britain is Best', 'Keep on Truckin' and 'Just One Stroke'.
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