But now we prove nothing beyond our ability to amass things and press 'Buy It Now' on eBay.
And yet, collecting anything makes sense to me. Ten years ago I would have scoffed at people who collected luggage tags, or at least not given them another thought. But now I embrace collectors of car air fresheners and chocolate wrappers, and my impression of strangers or the recently deceased increases when I learn, for example, that Henry Moore's wife Irina was a voracious collector of matchboxes. I have joined the Ephemera Society, where I am one of the youngest members.
I appear in the Ephemera Society Handbook as a collector of Tube maps. The Ephemera Society is not interested in stamps, but in things which don't have much of an established market in the wider world, or at least the world beyond Ephemera Society events, often held in Russell Square hotels. These included airline sick bags, Victorian scraps, copies of Parade with rusted staples. The things laid out haphazardly on the trestle tables at the Society's biannual sales are mostly printed matter, and often it is only the fact that they were once printed at all that gives them currency. They were meant to inform and then to be thrown away, but some of them survived and are now worth a quid or two. Hotel napkins. Labels from wooden fruit crates.
But what of the non-printed material that we write ourselves as notes and lists? Someone called Yvette phoned—she'll call again tomorrow. Please water the plants while I'm away. A dozen eggs, Frosties, ketchup. And what if we decided to collect these shopping lists and derived pleasure from it? I used to believe that this would be the most absurd thing any collector could aspire to, almost beyond the bounds of comprehension, and then I met someone who collected shopping lists.
Chris Moulin, PhD, a neuropsychologist specialising in Alzheimer's at the University of Leeds, did not volunteer this information from the off. We had been talking for a while about experiments he had conducted that were designed to repair a person's ability to learn. Twenty minutes passed, and then, somewhat sheepishly, he admitted that he collected shopping lists in an album, and told me that his fascination began after he found a list on the floor of a memory clinic which read 'bin liners, memory clinic, lunch'. His favourite is a piece of paper from a supermarket with just one word on it: 'Oil'.
This is not unusual. Marilynn Gelfman Karp has written a large illustrated book about strange collecting passions (it has a terrible title: In Flagrante Collecto). According to the dust-jacket, Karp is Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art Professions in the Steinhardt School at New York University, which is itself a valuable collection of the word 'Art'. Her book contains a small section on her own love of shopping lists, and these are catalogued as if they were Roman coins or Renaissance masterpieces: 'I: Group of Shopping Lists, 1991–2004, ink on paper, 3½–4" high; 2. Group of shopping lists, 1987–2004, ink on paper 3½–8½" high.' These include, on a variety of paper, some of it crumpled, the instructions not to forget 'tanning oil, juice boxes, bathing suit, tennis, bottled water, snack bags'; 'breast pads, shredded cheese, 8 pepper, choco'; 'screen 28½ × 50, latch top, gate latch, putty'; '5 anchovies, 2 jam, 1 olives'; 'bread, grapes, milk, dye hair, 4 roses'.
And shopping lists are nothing. * Some people collect the little slips of paper inserted with bought clothes and electronics to confirm quality control: 'This garment has been thoroughly inspected by Inspector No. 44'; 'Inspected by Sandra'; 'We hope you'll enjoy the comfort, wearability and quality of these shoes that I have inspected'—this last note signed simply '3'. In 'The Volcano Collector', Susan Sontag writes of a man known as 'Picture-mad'. 'As a child he collected coins, then automata, then musical instruments. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip of not what is collected but of collecting.'
All this stuff. When I enter my house there is a long wall of London Underground maps on the wall. One wall will not contain them—they have spread onto the opposite wall and up the stairs, the oldest from 1902, twenty-eight framed examples of the perfect lesson in form and function, beautiful in their simplicity and colour. I don't know why I began my collection, but I have pursued it at transport and book fairs and map and Internet auctions, and I have derived the usual thrills of outbidding and being outbid, and narrowing down my wants list from Edward Johnston and MacDonald Gill designs to the first maps of Harry Beck, from the District and Central lines alone to the first unified maps of 1906, from the ones with old stations like Mark Lane and Post Office to the opening of the Jubilee extension to Stratford. Visitors seem to like them when they come to the house, and have used the latest one to get home.
In the sitting-room there is a glass case with Technicolor Corgi and Dinky cars from television shows and movies, and I'd be embarrassed by them if they weren't so attractive and exciting in their original cardboard boxes, if they weren't so complete with their Man from U.N.C.L.E. Waverly ring, Avengers poison-tipped umbrellas, their Batman exhaust missiles and James Bond ejector seats. Besides, there was nothing unusual about these models or the rest of the collection—just the normal Thunderbirds/Joe 90/Captain Scarlet/Yellow Submarine/Saint/Kojak/Monkeemobile spread—and there was nothing there that most other British men in their forties wouldn't also desire.
Upstairs there are the two cases of enamel Chelsea badges, and crates of rare Elvis Costello records, mostly from the late 197os when his singles had different sleeves throughout Europe and the vinyl came with different B-sides and colours. I don't know why I wanted six different copies of 'Less Than Zero' and ten of 'Watching the Detectives', and I never play them and seldom look at them, but I am reassured by Record Collector magazine that my eccentricities are not unique (or even rare).
I did not tend to question my collecting habits, I just enjoyed them. I thought that one day I might put everything on display and have my own little museum for the appreciative. But nowadays there is no avoiding the conclusion that my collecting habits are tied up with the death of my father. I became keener as the size of my family declined. Within a few years in my late teens I lost several relatives—grandparents, an aunt, a cousin—and I began to wonder whether stamps were in some way compensating for a family. They are a solace, and a way of restoring order. They may suggest an element of control in a fateful world—everything in its place, just like the old days.
I'm with Sigmund Freud on this. My brief period of not collecting stamps ended not long after my father died, and I was mad about other things as well—Esso coins, old magazines, Tube tickets.* Freud began collecting seriously just after his father died in 1896, but he had been thinking clearly about collecting the year before. Freud collected fertility figures; inevitably, collecting was about sex, or the lack of it. 'When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuffboxes, the former is finding a substitute for her need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for—a multitude of conquests. Every collector is a substitute for a Don Juan Tenerio, and so too is the mountaineer, the sportsman, and such people. These are erotic equivalents.' *
But what happens when you flip? I think that most collectors at some point question the purpose of what they're doing. Is collecting futile? What am I trying to prove? Why am I spending all this money on things I don't need?
Certainly the art world has a handle on this. In 2000, the British artist Michael Landy decided he had enough of things, and the way we define ourselves by what we possess, so he destroyed them in an event in Oxford Street called Break Down. Everything he owned went. Two years later the same thing happened in America, when a twenty-nine-year-old man called John Freyer decided he needed some spare money and didn't really need anything he had collected in his life, and so he put everything on eBay. Everything, including sideburns and half-consumed jars of food. He believed, and rightly so, that someone would be collecting even the most absurd thing he had to offer.
When I met Freyer in New York he was promoting a book called All My Life for Sale. He had in fact already sold everything,
and so all there was left to do was collect the experiences of each sale in a compelling picture book. He hadn't just sold his things, including an answering-machine tape and his two false front teeth (a childhood accident on a golf course), he had also visited the people who had bought them. He had sold a brick to a bidder in London (cost of brick $3, cost of postage $35, but Freyer felt embarrassed and only charged $10), and his sideburns went for $19.50 to a man in Pittsburgh who later reported he was disillusioned with his purchase. I watched Freyer as he set up a slideshow at Makor, a Jewish community centre on the Upper West Side. He was only one participant on a six-person panel. The others were all people who had bought something from Freyer on eBay in the last year. There was a man who had bought a Stevie Wonder LP, a woman who had bought a US army chair, a female rock critic called Mary Huhn who had bought an old Hawaiian instrumental album, and there was Adam Cohen, a reporter on the New York Times who had written a book about eBay called The Perfect Store and had bought Freyer's fish-print shirt. Cohen said that Freyer now had an imitator in Australia who was selling her life on a site called AMLFS.com (she couldn't use the full allmylifeforsale domain name, because Freyer had already sold it to the University of Iowa Museum of Art for $1,165 after thirty-four bids).
How strange, I thought, as I learnt about the person who had bought his bag of Porky's BBQ Pork Skins. Were people now collecting because they were keen to be part of a consumerist art statement, or just for the madness of it, to build up a lot of one thing no one else cared about? In this way one could become unique, and put down a marker on the earth. But then I realised I had done something similar without knowing it, and I saw that the person who had collected the strangest thing of all was me.
For about six years, between the ages of six and twelve, I had collected fluff. Not fluff as in 'something that is superficial', or even fluff as in 'error of delivering lines on stage', but actual fluff from a green carpet in my house.
I don't know how this began, or even why I did it. I used to sit on the stairs in my childhood home and pick at the green carpet with my thumb and forefinger, gathering what I could until I had a thin strip of soft fibres about two inches long and an inch wide. I would then place this on my forehead between my eyebrow and my temple, and derive unqualified pleasure from it, especially when I fell asleep at night. After a few days I would tire of one particular shape or thickness of what I had come to call 'fluff', and then start the process again, keeping my old samples in a tin.
What more can I tell you about this, other than that it helped if you put a few drops of water on the carpet first to aid the tension between finger and weave? For a year or so I did this openly, and then my parents began to object to the unusual wear on certain parts of the carpet towards the top of the landing, and I was forbidden to pick fluff any more. My mother asked a department store for some small green carpet samples so that I could pick in my room without ruining the house, but these were a very poor substitute and usually wouldn't bind properly. I kept picking on the stairs for another five years, built up quite a collection, and then just as suddenly grew bored with it and stopped.
My stamp collecting, by comparison, was a reasonably respectable and basic thing to be getting on with. I was following a path laid down over decades—the natural, predictable and aesthetically pleasing way of accumulating anything interesting: one of every picture stamp and diverting oddities. But some people didn't collect like this, including an old friend of mine called Paul Hersh. I was aware that Paul had collected for years, but we had never talked about it. My wife was friendly with his wife, and his wife would occasionally worry that he was spending a bit too much time and money on stamps, but during my fallow period I never thought to question him about this. We spent our time together talking about his work producing comedy shows for the BBC.
But after I had become hooked on stamps again we got around to the topic immediately, and now we talk of nothing else. His collection is somewhat specialised. In fact, it is the most specialised and craziest collection I have ever seen. It is so specialised and so crazy that he asked me to change his real name when I wrote about it and him, for fear of ridicule from those who may not understand. Hersh collects stamps from Batum and also GRI overprints (Georgius Rex Imperator, George V being the reigning monarch at the time of overprinting), but his big thing is Machins. These stamps are the basic labels of postage that people in the UK use every day. They have the Queen's head and the denomination and that's it—no illustration commemorating a special event, just a single-colour background, a big profile of the Queen's crowned head and shoulders based on a bust by Arnold Machin, and the number ip, 2p and upwards in a corner, or maybe the class indicator 'ist' or '2nd'. (British stamps, being the first, have the honour of being the only ones not to bear the name of the issuing country.)
When I first went round to Paul Hersh's house and he took his Machin albums from the shelf, he said, 'Are you ready?' But I wasn't ready at all. Each page of each album had the same stamp on it. There were pages and pages of identical bright green, dull orange, blue, almost blue, and deep olive-grey stamps, not to mention the violet, carmine, ochre-brown and ultramarine.
'How many of these do you have?' I asked him, pointing to the bright-blue ones. 'About 150.'
'And how many Machins overall?' This took him a little longer to work out.
'About 3,360. There are about twenty or thirty I'm missing. But of course that's not including booklet panes and coils. So you could say I only do the fag-end of it.'
They were not, of course, all the same. In fact, they were all different, though you could only tell with the aid of a perforation counter, an ultraviolet lamp, and a ten-inch-thick two-volume catalogue with monthly updates. A 20p stamp has many variations of paper, printer, printing process, gum, phosphor band, shade, perforation, underprint, fluorescence and numerical design, and it takes a certain sort of individual to care. And if they do care, they will also be concerned about many other values, including the vaguely unimaginable 20½p.
The Machin first appeared in June 1967. Arnold Machin was a painstaking sculptor working on a profile of the Queen for new coinage when asked by Tony Benn to produce an image for the definitive stamp. This would replace the portrait produced from the photographic studio of Dorothy Wilding that had been used since her coronation and was looking dated, and the new design was intended to be flattering, regal and simple. It was also intended to last, which, with very modest alterations, it has done for more than forty years. At the beginning of 2008 it overtook the Penny Black and Twopence Blue as the longest-lasting stamp design in the world, undergoing some four hundred different basic colour or price variations (before Paul Hersh and his friends began finding other things interesting or wrong). The stamp has become one of those everyday icons that we use without thinking. Once we have looked at the value, only the most retentive collectors are able to match a stamp's colour to its price. It is estimated that the Machin has been printed almost 200 billion times.
The things that interest Hersh include the following facts and firsts: an early proof of the stamp was printed with the Queen cut off at the neck, but she judged this too naked, approving the design only after the addition of a corsage.
The photograph of Arnold Machin's bas-relief sculpture of the Queen was taken in misty half-light in the car park of the printers Harrison & Sons so as best to define its shadows and details.*
The first three stamps—the 4d, 1s and 1s 9d—were printed with phosphor bands to aid automatic sorting, and were also the first stamps in Britain not to have a watermark (the coated paper and phosphor was regarded as guard enough against forgery).
The two-tier first- and second-class postal system was introduced in September 1968, with second class costing 4d and first class 5d. For a year after decimalisation was introduced on 15 February 1971, letters could be sent with a mixture of old and new stamps.
In 1985, for the first time since the Penny Black, the cost of postage went down, second class redu
ced from 13p to 12p.
In the mid-1980s there were serious attempts to find a replacement design for the Machin, and several straight-on portraits were essayed instead of the traditional image facing towards the left, but they were all rejected; it was tacitly acknowledged that the Machin would endure to the end of the Queen's reign—the older the monarch, the younger and more flattering our vision of her.
Paul Hersh was born in 1960, seven years before the first Machin was printed. He began collecting at the age of eight or nine, but it was mostly mint stamps from the post office and first-day covers. His grandfather bought him a few things, he joined the stamp club at school, and he stopped at about fourteen. He can't quite pinpoint why he got back into it, but he thinks the advent of the home computer was partly responsible. 'Stamps were made for computers,' he told me, 'because they look beautiful when scanned and enlarged, it's so easy to catalogue and trade them, and the nerdery of stamps and the early nerdery of computers were made for each other.'
The Error World Page 11
