The Error World

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Boston
•
New York
2009

First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2008 by Simon Garfield

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Faber and Faber Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garfield, Simon.
The error world: an affair with stamps/Simon Garfield.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Garfield, Simon. 2. Stamp collectors—England—London—Biography.
3. Authors, English—20th century—Biography. 4. Journalists—England—
London—Biography. 5. Postage stamps—Errors—England—London. I. Title.
HE
6207.
G
37
A
3 2008 769.56092—dc22
[B]
2008026086
ISBN
978-0-15-101396-8

Text set in Sabon

Printed in the United States of America

DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Julian and Mandy

1 T
HE
P
ERFECT
S
TAMP
[>]

2 G
UTTER
P
AIRS
[>]

3 I
MAGININGS
[>]

4 M
Y
D
EALER
[>]

5 N
OT
A
LONE
[>]

6 A
LMOST
B
LUE
[>]

7 H
EINZ
[>]

8 M
ISSING
T
[>]

9 M
OUNTS
L
ONG
D
RY
[>]

10 N
OT FOR
S
ALE
[>]

11 P
ERFORATIONS
[>]

12 T
HE
E
RROR
W
ORLD
[>]

P
OSTSCRIPT
[>]

Acknowledgements
[>]

Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out.

It is almost one o'clock on 22 November 2006, a Wednesday. I'm standing just inside the door of my marriage guidance counsellor's house in north London. I have a stamp album under my arm and I am in all kinds of trouble—emotional, financial, philatelic—a situation I couldn't have imagined two years before.

My marriage is over, but the reasons are still unravelling.

We have drifted apart over the years. I have fallen in love and I'm having an affair. I have developed a passion for someone I loved when I was young, and for something I loved when I was a child. I am forty-seven, and I can't concentrate on anything for very long.

I have built up a stamp collection I can barely afford, and it has brought me to the brink of ruin. The affair and my stamps, the two secrets that have brought me here to a small room in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, are not unconnected, for both are quests for meaning, the classic mid-life dilemma. For my marriage guidance counsellor the affair is a commonplace: a lack of intimacy and honesty with my wife, a beautiful woman who has rejuvenated my days and made me feel attractive, hotel rooms. But the stamps are something unusual.

Collecting fills a hole in a life, and gives it a semblance of meaning. When men get together to talk about their passions, we don't just talk about what we love—our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings—but also how much these desires have cost us, and what we have lost. We try to regain what we cannot. We talk about the one that got away—the prized possession—as if that would have made everything right.

Little do wives know: I first heard this phrase from Michael Sefi, the keeper of the Queen's stamps. Then there were similar observations from the head of an auction house and my stamp dealer. They often spun a web of secrets for their clients, something they called discretion. My philatelic icon, a man who had the heroic name Sir Gawaine Baillie, had built up a collection worth more than ten million pounds, but his wife thought it was worth £800,000.

In the past I have wondered whether my affair was a sort of hobby too, a diversion from reality, a club of extreme enthusiasm. We loved talking about our love, and would sometimes talk of nothing else, shutting out the world with our own code. We knew it wasn't harmless, and that devastating and far-reaching things would surely follow, but we considered ourselves above life itself.

I found it easier to talk about my affair than my stamps. I was actually proud of it, even in front of my wife. In my mid-forties I could still ignite passion in myself and in another; better, it was a passion I had never felt before. And anyone could understand these emotions, the stuff of books and films, and of a million lucky lives. But stamps? Used postage? Who could be passionate about that? And who could explain it?

I told my wife of my affair in a straightforward way, on a walk along the Kent coast one afternoon, and things moved swiftly from there. Within a week I was sleeping in my office, within a month in a rented flat. There is a practical way these things advance, a clinical order to offset the hurt and anger and tears. There is professional help to call upon. But an affair with stamps—stamps as a mistress, just as uncontrollable as the wildest edge of obsessive love—that might take half a lifetime to understand.

My wife still doesn't appreciate my stamps, but my marriage guidance counsellor, who I shall call Jenny, is making a good attempt. After our session this lunchtime I have an appointment at an auction house, not to buy but to sell, a meeting that will place a monetary value on my private hobby, which in turn will affect my immediate future and the level of extended mortgages and maintenance payments. Rather than leave my stamps in my car I have brought them in, and I am opening the cover for Jenny to examine.

She is bored out of her mind in less than thirty seconds. She doesn't even feign interest. I say, 'Look at this one, it lacks olive-green!' She says, 'I know they mean a lot to you.'

I don't collect ordinary stamps. I collect stamps with errors, with absent colours, with printing faults. It doesn't take long for my marriage guidance counsellor to make the connection between what I collect—stamps with bits missing—and my family history, which has been a life with people missing. I mention to her that Freud considered collecting as 'compensation for loss', and she nods. She doesn't understand the beauty of the stamps in my album, but she can see that selling them is a great loss, another imminent separation.

Six years before, stamps were nothing in my world. I gave them no more thought than other childhood things. But I have since found that stamps possess a force greater than their subtle charms suggest, and that no objects so public have permeated my life with such effect.

Stamps don't leave you. They are not like people. They are like grief, always there, first as wonders at the end of a post office queue, and in later life as a silent link to the past. Aesthetically they may bring me to tears. Socially they may embarrass me ('You collect
stamps? You? Who once followed The Clash on tour?'
) And financially they have the power to bankrupt me.

Which is how I ended up in this doorway, the end of a £50 session, £40,000 worth of stamps in an album under my arm, barely able to look at my wife, an appointment at an auction house in ninety minutes, and aware as never before of how much of my life has been casually transformed by small and beautiful things that most people are more than happy just to stick on an envelope and send away.

***

In 1968 I had a crush on a girl who was frightened of the Post Office Tower. The girl, Melanie Kilim, aged ten, was the sister of my best friend, and even as an eight year old I understood this relationship to have the potential of something socially complicated. The crush passed, I don't think I even held her hand, and now I hardly see her. But my friendship with her brother endured, and we meet every week to talk of work and children. Forty years have passed, and our lives have changed a great deal. But one thing holds firm: his sister Melanie is still frightened of the Post Office Tower.

One evening in April 2005, when I had just turned forty-five, I called her up about it out of the blue. 'Hi Melanie, this is Gus.' Gus was my school nickname. 'It's been quite a while, but I want to ask you about something I've always wondered about...' Melanie was forthcoming. She said her phobia began not long after the building went up in 1965, transforming and modernising the London skyline. She thought her fear of it might have something to do with the Daleks in
Dr Who,
and with the memory of a man in a neck-brace she once saw in the local greengrocer's in Golders Green. I was looking for a more obvious explanation—something sexual perhaps—but she dismissed this. She wasn't nervous of any other tall buildings, just what she called this 'grey-green monster', and she explained that what she really didn't like was the possibility that the tower might suddenly jump out at her. She would turn a corner in Soho or Bloomsbury, and there it would be: 'I think it might attack and strangle me—something to do with the neck again.'

To avoid this fearsome eventuality, Melanie Kilim told me that she had developed an extraordinary sense of positioning and direction. She said there was no street in the tower's vicinity where she didn't know what she would see when she turned the corner. If this was to be the tower, she knew the perfect diversion. She told me that once, when visiting the Middlesex Hospital, only a few yards from the tower, she had worn a blindfold to avoid an otherwise inevitable sighting.

The object that had always repelled Melanie had always attracted me. As a boy, I was fascinated with it. It was new. It was statistically engaging. Out of the then generally flat London landscape, it rose astonishingly to 619 feet—the highest structure in London, nearly twice the height of the dome of St Paul's. It weighed 13,000 tons and contained 780 tons of steel. The two lifts travelled at 1,000 feet a minute, and if you took one of them to the top you'd be at the revolving restaurant which turned two and a half times every hour, which meant you didn't have to wait too long to see my house in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Shortly after it opened, the Post Office Tower could handle 100,000 telephone calls simultaneously. It boosted radio and television signals, bouncing the waves over the new London high-rises on to the Home County hills. The one thing it didn't seem to have much to do with was the post office. You could see the main letter-sorting office at Mount Pleasant from the top, but that was about it. I visited with my father in the first few months, and I treasured the translucent green plastic model he bought me at the gift shop, which I still have in a cupboard next to a toy grouping of the Chimpanzees' Tea Party from London Zoo.

For me, the opening of the tower marked not only the completion of a landmark, but the birth of something equally special—a commemorative postage stamp with a fabulous error on it. I first became aware of this in 1968, when a stamp magazine carried the news of this discovery with great excitement. There were about 55,500,000 of the normal stamps sold, but only about thirty with the mistake on it. I looked at a photo of the stamp with the flaw—a printing glitch: it was captioned '1965 Post Office Tower, olive-green omitted'. To an eight year old, this was unbelievable. The only thing that was supposed to have been printed in olive-green was the Post Office Tower itself; the surrounding buildings were all there, but in place of the tower there was only white space. At the age of eight I thought, 'This would be the perfect stamp for Melanie.'

I'd like to think that every schoolboy collected stamps in those days, although I'm sure that even in 1968 it was a hobby that was falling away. But for me it was ideal. I was part of a middle-class family in a middle-class place, and I lived in a comfortable house among neighbours who kept pets and had an aversion to noise after 7.30 p.m. Hampstead Garden Suburb was established by Dame Henrietta Barnett in 1907 with the aim of making 'a bit of God's earth beautiful for generations ahead'. About thirteen thousand live there now, and in recent years it has become a ruralish idyll for celebrity television presenters Jonathan Ross, Vanessa Feltz and Richard and Judy. But the famous have always valued its seclusion: the dour actor Alastair Sim lived up the road; the newsreader Robert Dougall lived a few doors away. Elizabeth Taylor was born three houses from mine and remembers a perfect childhood: 'My brother and I would run through the woods and feel quite safe,' she wrote of her memories of the 1930s. 'I wonder whether the Suburb is like that now.' It was when I was there in the 1960s.

My father fitted right in. He was a successful solicitor in the City, he played golf at weekends, bought a sports car in middle age, took me sometimes to synagogue on Saturday morning, and wished me to do better in school. My brother, Jonathan, was almost five years older than me, effortlessly skilled at maths and the sciences, fast enough as a bowler to practise with junior teams at Lord's. I once broke his arm wrestling on the carpet, but usually (both before this event and after) we had little to do with each other. My mother looked after us all, occasionally helping in local old-people's homes, and entertaining friends with her cooking and charm. This life was all I knew, and it seemed ideal. I remember walking back from school with a fellow pupil called Will Self, who had still to discover drugs or novel writing, and learning that he was about to go on holiday to the Seychelles. I had no idea what or where that was. I hadn't yet experienced abroad; my parents went on foreign trips together, leaving my brother and me in the formidable charge of a Mrs Woolf, who made something called milk pudding for dessert every evening and wouldn't let us drink water with our meals because it filled us up. The most daring thing I did was have my hair cut by a man in flares called Paul whose salon was called Unisex, a word the entire neighbourhood found exceptionally unsettling. Stamp collecting, that most quiet and respectful of pastimes, was something that all of my neighbours and parents' friends would have approved of; it offered no evidence of nonconformity or the budding turmoil of sex. The postage stamp is a silent thing, and an emblem of social order rather than its opposite. I first became interested in stamps at the age of six, and by the time I was eight they had me in their grip. Most children grow out of it. I only thought I had.