The Error World

by Simon Garfield

  'Hello Gillie, how are you?'

  'Hello!'

  Occasionally he didn't recognise me, but I didn't mind that. Usually I was just delighted to find him in. Often the lights were on, and it was regular trading hours, but Gillie was elsewhere, possibly in his inner sanctum, a little office at the far end which looked like it had been hit by jungle animals. Somewhere in that sanctum, perhaps on the floor, was a cheque of mine. I had given this to Gillie in exchange for a small painting by the architect Ffiona Lewis, but as my bank statements came in each month the cheque failed to register. After six months the cheque became void, and perhaps it lay in the office with other cheques of a greater magnitude. I should have spread the word—Free Art!—but thought this would be bad karma, and Gillie's place was all about karma. I had been told that sometimes he wasn't in the gallery, and wasn't in the inner sanctum, but he had left the door open. Occasionally he would even leave it open at night, all those Christopher Wood paintings and white reliefs by Ben Nicholson in perspex cases, leaning up against William Scott pears and cups in their boxy white frames, and he would return the next day and everything would be exactly as it was. The shop was protected by angels, and the world loved Gillie; there was no more logical way of explaining it.

  Whenever he was in, Gillie had a strong hand to play: the art of temptation. Our conversation usually proceeded in a predictable manner. He asked me what I did for a living. I said I was a writer—journalism and books. He spoke of the writers he knew.

  'Have you seen the court building in Truro?' he would ask.

  'I love it,' I would answer.

  'It was designed by Evans and Shalev.'

  'Who also did the Tate,' we'd say together.

  Once I mentioned stamps, but it took a while to find the right way in. 'Terry Frost designed a stamp,' I said.

  'Did he?'

  'Well, actually no. He didn't design it, because it appeared in 2004, the year after he died. But they used one of his paintings, and one by Sonia Delauney, to illustrate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale. In a unique and symbolic move, France issued the same stamps, but in euros rather than pence. They almost caused a philatelic revolt, such was the dismay at the simplicity and childish nature of the design.'

  'Did I tell you about my brother?' Gillie would ask.

  'Yes. He went to the LSE.'

  'That's right, he did go to the LSE.' He explained that he died.

  'I went to the LSE too,' I'd say, to lighten the mood. 'Economic History. I met Veerasamy Ringadoo, the First President of Mauritius.'

  'Did you know...' then a few names I hadn't heard of, followed by 'Do you ever go to the Alba?' This was a good fish restaurant on the harbour front.

  'Once,' I said. 'It was delicious.' And then, running out of things to say, I said, 'Urn, has Tate St Ives changed things much around here?'

  We were obviously skirting around, waiting for the main event. Gillie sat in a brightly coloured plastic chair by the door as I looked around. Every time I went in there the good stuff was more depleted. When I started visiting in my late teens it was mostly original oils on boards, and the last time I went it was framed Andy Warhol posters. In recent years, many of Gillie's best works appeared in the London auctions and did well, especially works by John Wells, who was newly in demand. But the Frost mugs and plates hung around, occasionally moving from one window-sill to the other, leaving a soft ring of dust behind each time. I can't imagine I was the only one after them, but when I returned each time and found that they were still there it was with relief, and a certain satisfaction that Gillie had proved as stubborn with his other visitors. There was no price on them, just as there was no price on most of his works; the very good ones were priced in his head, and they probably swung wildly according to his mood. On one occasion I was in the shop when an American came in and saw a Barbara Hepworth print. These were not her key works, and you could snap up a fair one for a couple of grand.

  'How much?' the American asked.

  'Priceless,' Gillie said, unwilling to sell at ten times its market worth.

  If he didn't like you he probably wouldn't even sell you a Warhol poster.

  After another ten minutes of friendly but familiar conversation—had I seen the Hepworth outside the St Ives guildhall, had I been to her grave at Carbis Bay—I realised it was time to step up to the plate.

  'How much for the plates?' I said. 'And the mugs?'

  'They were designed by Terry Frost,' he would say.

  'Yes. How much would you want for them?'

  'They're not for sale at the moment,' Gillie replied. 'Terry died in 2003.'

  'When do you think they will be for sale?' I doubted whether Count Ferrary ever had to pussyfoot around like this.

  'In four months?' Gillie said, and the question mark was doom-laden.

  'So if I came back in four months, I might be able to buy them?'

  Nine months later, when I came down again, the mugs and plates would still be there, and their imminent departure would still be four months away.

  'I'd be willing to pay a good price,' I'd say, hating myself as I did.

  Gillie looked a bit offended. Clearly this wasn't about money any more. It was about art, and the truth about art was that some things were just not for sale.

  I returned to St Ives in April 2007. I had prepared myself for the usual ordeal with Gillie, partly dreading it, half excited that this time I'd be successful. As I walked up to his gallery from the harbour, the path was blocked by workmen and their van. They were working at Gillie's gallery, and had already gutted it. Gillie was nowhere to be found, and all his pictures and ceramics were gone. 'We're refitting,' one of the workmen said. 'It's still going to be a gallery, but I don't think the old man is involved any more.'*

  The next time I saw Hockney was at his studio in the Hollywood Hills. He was designing two things. The first was a poster for the Tate, and the other was a stamp depicting a scene in a Californian desert. We talked about his age, his dogs and his hearing. 'It's getting worse and worse,' he said, as he showed me the box controlling his new hearing aids. 'It's not silence you get—I like silence—but it's a din, a cacophony. My father was the same; for the last ten years of his life he probably didn't hear a single word my mother said.'

  And we talked about sex before AIDS. 'Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time in New York in the late seventies and early eighties, working for the Metropolitan Opera. You could have sex with all kinds of people. If you had to organise that at home you'd have to have somebody professional to plan it.'

  When we talked about stamps he said: 'The problem with stamps is that they are very small. Just when you think you have them licked, there's always another element to think of. Licked—do you get it? I thought that was quite funny actually.'

  I told him about my regret at not buying the Fish and Chip Shop lithograph years before, and he said, 'Ah well, you see...' but then he trailed off and thought of something else. After years of experimentation with photo collage, photocopying and faxing, Hockney had recently rediscovered the joys of painting. He had completed a series of small portraits of friends and flowers and cacti, and the colour proofs of the catalogue for the London show of this work had arrived by FedEx that morning. These were rolled up uncut sheets, with half of the pages and illustrations printed upside down. He looked at them carefully, and took out a magnifying glass to examine certain details. Then he found a pen and started drawing on the proof, sketching and cross-stitching below several pictures so that it looked as though they were resting on easels. He drew lines on the edges of other illustrations, so that they resembled staples on the sides of taut canvas. Then he wrote, 'For Simon, David H,' and handed the proof to me.

  Perforations

  Stanley Gibbons celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2006, and the main thing the company appeared to be interested in that year was the possibility of stamps making you rich. The SG Investment Department was being quoted in the FT and on the BBC website, and it was printing lavish lea
flets about portfolios and fixed-return contracts. It was a buoyant time for stamps, some of which had outstripped property inflation. The Gibbons leaflet asked the simple question—'Why Invest in Stamps?'—and its unequivocal answers were designed to set any waverers with hedge funds and Christmas bonuses on a direct path to the Strand.

  'Stamps are a $10 billion per annum global business,' the leaflet claimed, but it was an unsourced figure, alongside the statement that '30 million collectors worldwide protect price and liquidity'. Thirty million? Where were these people? Other reasons to invest in stamps were: 'Emerging markets: Russia, China and India; appreciation of national heritage; supply shortage and increasing demand; 50,000 people per month enter the over-fifties market in the UK (source: FT); the Internet is a key factor for recruitment and growth.'

  According to Stanley Gibbons, the best place to invest in stamps was Stanley Gibbons. It was the oldest stamp brand, if you didn't count the Post Office or the Queen's head; it has held a royal warrant since 1914; it claimed to have recruited ten times more new customers in 2004 than 1994 (many of them through the possibilities of the Internet). The company was offering three investment options. There was the big one, the Stamp Investment Fund, domiciled offshore, minimum investment £20,000 held for five years, stamps all with a minimum catalogue value of £1,000. Then there were the managed portfolios, more flexible, stamps all pre-1900, stored in a secure vault, flexible payment and investment period options. And finally there were fixed-return contracts, set between three and twenty years, with a minimum investment of £5,000 and a return of 5–7 per cent per annum. You could get these packages in a 'free guide', which had a heart-warming image on the front: a man with grey hair in glasses—presumably a dad—enthusiastically poring over a pile of stamp albums and catalogues while a cool-looking spiky-haired teenage boy—presumably his son—looked on appreciatively. It was a photo only an ad agency could put together, and it resembled a famous advert for the watchmaker Patek Phillipe, which also had a father and son combo: 'You never actually own a Patek Phillipe,' the strapline pronounced. 'You merely look after it for the next generation.' What a swizz. There should have been a similar line with the Gibbons photo: 'You will never actually get your cool and truculent MySpacing son anywhere near your stamp collection. Until the day he can offload it at an auction house.'

  For a while in 2005, Stanley Gibbons and other stamp companies were also getting very excited about SIPPS, Gordon Brown's plan to allow stamps and other investments as part of a pension plan, with all the attendant tax breaks. This meant that collectors could buy some great items and claim 40 per cent from the Inland Revenue at the close of the financial year; they would obviously have to sell them again at retirement age, but at least they could enjoy them for a while. And then Gordon Brown realised that people would be buying all sorts of things they enjoyed, including holiday cottages, and he changed his mind.

  But stamps were still being touted as a safe bet. In the 150th anniversary edition of Gibbons Stamp Monthly, Mike Hall, the company's chief executive, expounded on the beauty of compound returns on a long-term investment. At the Alternative Investment Show in 2004, Gibbons launched what it called its '30 Rarities Index', a collection of valuable stamps, most of them unused, dating from the 2d blue of 1840 to the 1903 10d dull purple and carmine 'official'. Fifty years earlier, these thirty stamps had a catalogue value of £8,360, and in 2004 this had increased to £861,000. Hall then extrapolated the current prices to the company's bicentennial in 2056. Based on previous performance, the stamps could be catalogued at more than £186 million, if anyone was still around who was interested in them. Reading this reminded me of the famous prediction from another century, a forecast that if the boom in horse-drawn carriages continued at the same crazy rate, the streets would soon be covered in nine feet of horseshit.

  The first issue of Gibbons Stamp Monthly appeared in October 1927. Its first editorial spoke of stamps purely as 'the ideal recreation for hours of leisure'. The big concern some eighty years ago was not money but the two-pronged assault from radio and cinema, both perceived threats to contented evenings with hinges and tweezers. But no matter: the great hobby will prevail, for it promotes mental agility and individuality, and dedication brings a satisfaction far superior to the inanities of Americanised culture and the 'vacuous countenances' resulting from overexposure to the wireless. 'It is not strange, then,' the editorial suggested, 'that stamp collecting goes forward, while its competitors are largely static.'

  Several dealers I spoke to, traditionalists all, said that Gibhons's bullish pecuniary approach made them nervous. Stamps were for pleasure, they maintained, and profit should be secondary. They began to sound like the advice I'd received as a boy: 'More rubbish has been written about the investment side of stamp collecting than perhaps any other side of the hobby,' I had been instructed in a pamphlet called Let's Collect Stamps. 'Anyone who wishes to make a pure and simple investment would do well to find something other than stamps into which to put his money.'

  Most of the dealers I consulted had done rather well out of the stamps-as-investment line, and they knew that their clients didn't spend more than £10 on anything without the hope, however furtive, that one day they'd be able to sell at a profit. Accordingly, even the smaller dealers were establishing their own investment portfolios.

  As usual, David Brandon presented a convincing case. In order to sell stamps to people who weren't stamp collectors he had to dismiss their common fears. The first of these was the concern that stamps were just little pieces of paper that had often been sent through the post. Collecting stamps appears to satisfy a natural human need, Brandon told them. 'Before international travel and television, it provided a link with an exotic and unknown world far away.' When stamp collecting began, people enjoyed getting stamps from places they would never see. These days, with international travel scattering collectors worldwide, people collect to keep in touch with their country of origin. 'The fact that collecting continues to be strong confirms that its foundations are rooted in a need that is not being satisfied by other means.'

  Despite the fact that stamps only have a perceived value, they have an advantage over things such as Pez dispensers or Batmobiles: 170 years of history. Their value has been established in auction house catalogues, their provenance logged by collectors of discrimination.

  One reason stamps are not a fad is because we live in a world full of horrors. 'For individuals with some accumulated wealth,' Brandon wrote, 'stamps represent a portable vehicle for flight should that become a necessity.' Stamps are easier to conceal across international borders than gold or diamonds. Jews fled Germany in the 1930s with stamps in their wallets, and they set a pattern for the wealthy refugee in decades to come.

  Over lunch one day David Brandon told me that many of his non-collectors who had invested in stamps as an alternative to horses or football clubs had quickly become entranced by the few items in their portfolio, and in the course of learning more about them they had become specialists. Busy people also found them relaxing and transforming. I was reminded of a comment made by Richard Briers, the actor best known for his role in The Good Life. Briers had appeared in a television adaptation of a book I had written, and in the course of the filming I was pleased to learn of his interest in stamps. 'I'm one of those who looks at postmarks and things,' he said. 'It's a very calming thing to sort things out. You have a load of stamps and you sort them out into colours or prices or whatever. You're doing therapy. If you have a life of stress, like actors and most people do, it's very nice to have a quiet hobby. Leonard Rossiter died quite young because he was an extremely energised actor with an enormous amount of energy but unfortunately his hobby was squash. That is not good!'

  But Briers was now in his seventies, and he made me think about what will happen to stamps in forty years, when so many of the current collectors have sold up or died. Where are the young collectors to take their place and buy their stamps to keep the market afloat? Could stamps g
o the way of music hall—good in their time, but finished off by the young world looking elsewhere for its amusement?

  Possibly, but not just yet. After calling at the Brandons one day, and failing in my mission not to buy a stamp, I drove a few miles to the village of Mayford, near Woking, to visit the home of Richard Ashton. Ashton was the head of the stamp department at Sotheby's, and as I arrived he was laying out an auction catalogue of rare Australian stamps on his dining-room table. 'This is really exceptional,' he said, pointing to a particular strip. 'And this is probably the best example in the world...' It was the third sale of stamps from the collection of Sir Gawaine Baillie.

  Baillie was the £11 million man, the former racing driver and engineer who had secretly amassed such an enormous and impressive collection of stamps that it would take Sotheby's ten sales and two years to sell them all.* The vast sale catalogues were magnificent achievements in themselves, a lavish and educational guide to many of the world's most valuable stamps. To the average collector it was unimaginable that one man could have collected so many fine items, particularly since Baillie did not become serious about collecting until middle age.

  'When you've met so many collectors you get a feeling for how serious they are going to be,' Richard Ashton told me. When Baillie first turned up at Sotheby's to a public viewing of a forthcoming sale, Ashton invited him upstairs to have a private view. This set a pattern. 'Whenever we had sales, I met him for an early breakfast at about 7.15 at the café opposite Sotheby's back door in George Street. He'd then come up, and his viewing would be over by the time any of the staff arrived.' Baillie would then send his bids in, and the auctioneer would act on his behalf. He attended very few sales in person. 'I think he knew that if he sat in an auction and spent £20,000 on a stamp, every dealer in the country would be on to him.'