The Error World

by Simon Garfield

  In 2006, during a sort-out necessitated by my divorce, I came across some boxes of photographs and documents that justified all my basest instincts as a collector, and confirmed the value of hoarding as well. I had seen most of the items in the boxes before: photographs in albums and loose, stretching back to my great-grandparents in Hamburg. There were photographs of my parents when they were babies in absurd white ruffled blouses supplied by the photographer, an image of my father in his army uniform, a photo of my mother, on her first day at school, carrying a cardboard cone of sweets almost as big as her. There's one of me in a pram being pushed by my brother. My first dog Gus, a holiday in Torquay with my mother and brother and my mother's arm over my shoulder, an outing to Cambridge, playing in the garden with a beach-ball—all the usual moving things, ordinary compared to what I uncovered next. These were documents from Germany, banking and employment papers, my parents' school reports, naturalisation papers, my mother's CV when she was working at a museum in Palestine, my father's army commendations and speeches on legal affairs.

  And then there was one thing I couldn't remember seeing before. It is written on ten sides of thin white card, each the size of a piece of Wonderloaf. This is my mother's death diary, written by her home nurse during her last weeks with breast cancer from October to December 1979. It begins with a brief five-year medical history, a list of drugs taken, and a bit about me at the LSE at the age of nineteen ('...seldom home during the daytime, but is usually home in the evenings and is able to help prepare Mum some supper if she isn't feeling up to getting herself some').

  It's an account of slow decline, and I'm not quite sure who it was written for; perhaps it was for another nurse taking over; perhaps it was for me. It was too painful to consider at the time, and I must have just put it in a document album and hoped I could look at it in years to come.

  Friday, 26th October 1979: Over the worst of the high temperature. However, still feeling weak and unable to stay up for more than a few minutes.

  Monday, 29th October: Cooked her own lunch today. Got up + dressed as friends calling in late afternoon.

  Friday, 2nd November: Bathed, dressed, had lunch and went to have hair cut and set. Intends ringing GP as new batch of prednisolone is not enteric coated like the last. Not sure if it matters!

  Wednesday, 7th November: Had arranged for friend to take her into Selfridges to try and buy a suitable wig. However, had to put this off as she felt she just couldn't make it.

  Sunday, 23rd December: Decided to be up and about a bit. Mixed some matzo balls at the table in bedroom, then came downstairs and sat at stove and cooked them ... Could hardly make it up the stairs again (had Simon and I on either side of her).

  She died at the Middlesex Hospital six days later.

  The more I considered my parents, the more I was able to acknowledge that stamps were compensating for something. The period of greatest involvement and expenditure on errors coincided with the strongest feelings of grief over the loss of my family. It was a somewhat delayed bereavement, but I understand that a delay of twenty-five years is not uncommon. My sessions at marriage guidance, at which we discussed the break-up of my present family, brought events into focus.

  The sessions also made me think about something I rarely confronted. Or rather, someone. About eighteen months before she died, my mother went into remission. There seemed to be hope of a full recovery, the chemotherapy drugs pulling her through against the odds. She started making long-term plans again, and travelling to Israel to meet a man she had been friendly with for a while. My brother and I couldn't have been more delighted or surprised.

  My brother Jonathan had recently qualified as a doctor, and was training to be a surgeon. In 1978, I was eighteen and he was twenty-three, and although the age gap was still considerable, his work at the Royal Free Hospital in Belsize Park meant that he still lived at home and we saw a good deal of each other. He had a girlfriend called Jenny, also a medic, and their relationship was getting serious, and sometimes she stayed the night. I can't remember anything of our conversations, but he did help me with my A levels and my university applications. We played ping-pong on a makeshift table in his room, which was much larger than mine and had a lovely view of the garden, and we exchanged favourite records and cassettes. He was impressed that I had championed 'Jilted John' by Jilted John several weeks before it became a hit. And we both loved All Mod Cons by The Jam.

  Three days after Christmas, which we barely celebrated, Jonathan returned from the hospital with a cold. He went to bed early, by himself. The next morning, I remember my mother calling him from the landing, but there was no reply. She knocked on the door and called again, but still nothing. This was not like him to sleep so long. The door was locked. My mother began to panic, and I didn't know what to think. I can't remember how his door was broken down. My mother found him dead, in bed.

  The next week is a blank. I remember going to the funeral, and I've been told that one morning I came down to breakfast to find my mother sitting at the table with a knife in her hands. She was repeating two words: 'Why Jonathan? Why Jonathan? Why Jonathan?'

  And after that I think she gave up, and her cancer took hold once more.

  How did I react to my brother's death? Not well, and not badly. In the main, I blocked it out as best I could. Since then I have thought about Jonathan often, but I still find it difficult to talk about him. He died of viral pneumonia, which is usually only fatal in the very young or very old. It may be that his immune system was depleted by another infection he picked up at the hospital. In the past I have thought that he might have committed suicide, and I considered his locked door, but this thought has never made much sense to me.

  He was a gentle, generous and loving young man, and very gifted. Had he lived, he would have saved a lot of lives. I suppose I coped with his death by writing a book about AIDS fifteen years later, a book partly concerned with medicine but principally with young men dying. And I coped with it by falling deeper into my passions.

  My first serious relationship with a girl broke up around this time, and then university beckoned, and Elvis Costello, and other relationships, and a shot at student journalism. The one constant was stamps. Everything else in turmoil and flux, but the mail didn't let you down. New issues every few weeks, squirrelled away upstairs, and new discoveries at the dealers' windows. You can really bury your head in an album.

  Some things stay the same. I began to lose interest in stamps when I was twenty, about a year after my mother died. The world was just too full of other things and new emotions, and I had learnt to distrust old alliances. I felt that stamps belonged only to my family childhood. Now I was an adult on my own, and I had come to deal with my bereavements by believing that there was no point dwelling on the past. Along with so much else, stamps were nothing but the past.

  It was during a later period in my life, when things weren't going so well at home, that stamps again became all-consuming. Now it was our marriage that was dying. I once had ISAs and Tessas, but once those were spent on a new kitchen I decided to spend spare money on stamps instead. I was providing for my own family, but I also felt good about spending some of my earnings on my hobby, even though the sums involved—hundreds, occasionally thousands, on a stamp or block—were far greater than anything I would have spent a decade before. At one auction I spent just over £4,000 on several items, something I couldn't possibly admit to when I got home, no matter how excited I was. I went upstairs, looked at my new stamps, and put them away in my errors album, which I kept at the base of a built-in wardrobe in my office (a converted loft, initially an au pair's room).

  Then I thought about what had just happened. A catalogue had arrived containing one man's stamps. But before that: a man had died and his widow had decided to sell his collection, something he had spent a great many hours with, something he may have cared about almost as much as life itself, if for no other reason than it gave his life order and meaning; this was probably something his wife
couldn't understand no matter how much she tried or loved him. And before that: another man had a comparable passion, and had treasured and protected some nice items for the collectors who came next. It was a virtuous circle.

  When I had failed to buy my favourite stamp error at the Baillie sale, it was only money that had robbed me of my chance to own something I wanted, but I felt downcast. But after a while the memory of disappointment fades. Losing a stamp at an auction does not send you off with a shrug to another hobby. Instead, it sends you deeper into stamps, consistently in search of satisfaction.

  After the sale I made another call on Richard Ashton, and he consoled me with a tale of losing an item he thought should have been his. It was a ticket for the last ship to leave Guernsey before the Germans bombed the harbour. It was in a postal auction, and he bid six times the estimate but still didn't get it. 'I was so annoyed,' he told me. 'It was the boat my father was on.'

  In the autumn of 2005 there was to be another Baillie sale of GB items. Ashton couldn't remember exactly what was to be in it, although he knew that there were no more is 3d Parliamentary stamps. He thought it would contain some more missing minis or Jaguars, and the largest existing block of missing Post Office Towers. He sent me an email which touched me more than any other communication I have ever received about stamps. He wrote that after the next Baillie GB catalogue was published, perhaps I'd like to come for a spot of lunch at Sotheby's and enjoy a private view.

  But things were changing for me. In 2005, I had already begun to sense that my desire to acquire more stamps was waning. I began to feel uneasy with the secretiveness of it. This was not only the money I was spending on it and the secluded time with albums and catalogues, but also the fact that I couldn't easily display what I owned. Outside public exhibitions, it makes no sense to put stamps on display. They would be damaged by light, but there was a deeper problem: who, beyond other collectors, would appreciate them? I found it quite damaging when, on the rare occasions, when I would show people my stamps, they would show no interest. They didn't know what they were looking at, I couldn't adequately explain it, and I hurriedly put the albums back in the slipcases. I feel as I do when I describe the idea for a new book: it's complete in my head, but every time I talk about it it becomes diluted.

  I also had a feeling that my error collection contained almost everything it ever would. It was an above-average collection, with some fine items in there, but it wasn't really going anywhere, or certainly not at the pace it had when I began it. I wasn't interested in the less dramatic errors, the tiny flaws undetectable without a magnifying glass. And the more spectacular ones, the ones with only five or six prime copies, I couldn't afford. So my collection was just sitting there, less a living thing than a mausoleum. In addition, I had read a comment from Hilary Rubenstein, a clinical psychologist and Co-chair of Junior Associates of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in which she began to describe a condition I was edging towards. 'The urge to collect only becomes pathological or perverse for collectors when they really can't get any satisfaction from it. If their central experience is that they can't get enough and someone else always has more and they are always unhappy and envious and driving themselves to financial ruin, then that doesn't work out quite so well.' *

  When my affair began at the end of 2005 I had another thing to keep hidden from the light. But it also made me question where I had been placing my affections. Freud was right—collecting as a substitute for sex. Even the loveliest of objects don't offer passion back. It made me go all Lennon-ish and wonder whether I could survive quite happily without any possessions at all, because now there was something else that filled the space previously satisfied, however briefly, by the desire for and purchase of objects. (The nature of stamp collecting is partly non-consumerist, as we safeguard artefacts that previously would have been used up and thrown away, but in the twenty-first century collecting ultimately always means buying things.) And so I imagined myself as George Eliot's Silas Marner, obsessing over his coin collection ('But at night came his revelry ... He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them ... He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him...'), until his love of humanity and the living world is rekindled by his emotions towards the golden-haired child Effie.

  Once I had decided to sell my errors, I had two options. The Brandons or an auction house. I called David Brandon to say I was thinking of selling, and he sounded interested. He asked me to send him digital photographs of the best items by email. The following day, after some very long downloads, he invited me down for another lunch. Perhaps, I thought, this would be the last time I would see him.

  No sooner had I arrived at his house near Guildford than the phone rang in his office.

  'Oh Harry, hello!' he said. Followed by, 'Oh ... it's Danny! Even better! How are you, Danny? Good. Hmm ... mmm. Probably yes, but I normally know the moment I see them if there's going to be a problem. I'll look at them, and if there's anything wrong I'll report it immediately. If not I'll put them in the back of my safe and sort them out in the months to come. It's not normally a question of forgery with your stuff, it's just a question of condition. Perhaps the odd tear or thin, which of course makes all the difference ... I'll only tell you if there's a problem, and I'll simply say, "Lot number so-and-so will be returned because of this...", but I'm sure they'll all be all right. Yes. All the best, Danny, bye.'

  'That was Danny,' Brandon said. 'I'm buying stuff all over the world.'

  I asked whether his son Mark had spent a lot at the world convention in Washington.

  'Absolute fortunes! And Linda was in London today, and she picked up from Grosvenor [an auction house], that was £77,000 something. Then she went on to Spink [another auction house], that was £40-something thousand. It never stops ... Right, we better have a look at your little bits and pieces.'

  I opened my album.

  Brandon said, 'I did do some work on it yesterday, and these are my notes, so let's hope that my notes are correct, the best notes I could do looking at your pictures. Do you want something to look at for five minutes? Do you want a car magazine?'

  'Sure.'

  'I just need to see if any of them are creased.'

  'All of them are creased,' I said. 'I creased them all on the way down on purpose.'

  'Let's have a look ... the thing is, I'm buying very heavily at the moment and not selling very much.'

  This was all classic Brandon. He once showed me his slippers—ghastly leatherette held together with tape—as an indication of how cash-strapped he was.

  Linda arrived with the tea. 'Do you want your sandwich in here?' she asked.

  'I think it will be safer in the kitchen,' Brandon suggested as he started cataloguing my stamps. 'Right, now where's my tweezers?'

  Linda, from the hallway: 'Let me ask, do you want salad cream on it?'

  Me: 'No thanks!'

  Brandon: 'Don't have it too thick, Linda, just ordinary salmon, but not too thick or it will fall all over the place.'

  Brandon turned back to my album, and I assumed nonchalance.

  'So let's see if I've catalogued these correctly ... in fact, if you want a job, if I call out the catalogue values, you write them down. Shouldn't take very long this ... six times of these, that's £800, that's ... the tubes omitted in normal, £300 each, they've shot up ... the World Cup...£800 ... hmmmm ... is this World Cup missing something?...ah, black omitted, £110 ... and the Post Office Towers, £4,000.'

  Brandon's plan was to offer me a good percentage of the values in the current Stanley Gibbons catalogue. Traditionally, the Gibbons prices were far higher than those charged by other dealers, and usually more than auction prices. But with errors, especially the rare ones, auction prices often matched the Gibbons catalogue and occasionally exceeded it.

  'So that's £1,500, The Forth Bridge is £2,700, the Geographical with 4d value omitted, that's £160 each...'

  And so it went on, th
rough fifteen items. I felt a combination of sadness (that it had come to this, after years of collecting, my album on a dealer's desk being not admired but valued) and relief (that my stamps were indeed valuable, that I hadn't been buying rubbish, that the tiny pieces of paper had in many cases increased considerably in worth from the time I bought them; better still, Brandon was now valuing them at a greater price than he had sold them to me, which is a collector's dream. This very rarely happens).

  And then there was more sadness. I would—by auction or Brandon—soon be saying goodbye to these coveted secret passions. Like a station-platform parting, part of me wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. I didn't explain to him precisely why I had to sell—renting a flat, maintenance, buying a new car—but I'm sure he guessed, because he would have done this sort of thing many times before.

  'The 1s 3d—did I sell you that? No? £1,600. It's amazing how some of these have gone up ... the Ships missing red, £50 ... the missing Queen's head, that's £280, then we've got the horsey, what year's the horsey?'

  I consulted the catalogue. The horsey, a stamp featuring a painting by George Stubbs, was from 1967.

  'You've got some nice stuff, Simon,' he said. 'I should know—I sold you a lot of it. At some point we probably owned 80–90 per cent of it.'

  'Yes, a lot of it may be coming home.'

  We talked about the amount we'd both save on commission charges if I sold to him rather than at auction. I'd save between 10 and 15 per cent seller's commission, and he'd save around 20 per cent including VAT. He argued that he could offer me more as a result, because when he's bidding at auction for my stamps he'd offer less, knowing that he'd have to add on 20 per cent at the end to the auction house. 'Auction is a place to buy, not to sell,' he told me several times. He claimed that I'd be the beneficiary, but I couldn't help thinking the big winner would always be him, the dealer. In the end, Brandon came up with a figure that I considered too low, so we haggled for a bit.