The Error World (11 page)

There was a problem almost immediately: the red cancellations issued in a Maltese Cross design were easily removed and the stamps used again. 'All sorts of tricks are being played by the public,' Rowland Hill observed, and much time and effort was spent on finding an answer. Additives appeared on the stamps to hold the ink, and the red ink was later changed to black. But in the end another solution was found: the Penny Black would be replaced in February 1841 by another stamp that would be less open to abuse: the Penny Red. The problem with the Penny Red was, it didn't carry the same weight of history, it was lighter in weight and didn't feel the same in the hand, and it wasn't beautiful.

In 1843 Rowland Hill went to work for the London & Brighton Railway, but he returned to postal reform three years later, and his endeavours transformed the landscape. He campaigned among householders and carpenters to have his letterboxes installed, he greatly increased the number of roadside posting boxes, and he introduced the concept of London postal districts. By the time of his retirement in 1864, half the world had adopted his reforms; no one, with the possible exception of the railway Stephensons, contributed more to the global communication of ideas.

And beyond this, Hill may be credited with inventing an entirely new hobby. Sheets of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues contained 240 stamps, and to limit forgeries and enable the tracing of portions of a sheet, each stamp had a letter in the two bottom corners. The rows running down the sheet had the same letter in the left corner, while the right corner progressed alphabetically. The first row went AA, AB, AC and so on, and thirteen rows down it went MA, MB, MC ... There were twenty horizontal rows of twelve, so that the last stamp at the bottom right-hand corner was TL. People who got a lot of post thought it would be fun to collect the set.

One of the first mentions of the new hobby appeared in a German magazine in 1845, which noted, much in the manner of comedian Bob Newhart describing Raleigh's attempt to promote tobacco, how the English post office sold 'small square pieces of paper bearing the head of the Queen, and these are stuck on the letter to be franked'. The writer observed that the Queen's head looked very pretty, and that the English 'reveal their strange character by collecting these stamps'.

The first collector history is aware of was a woman known only as 'E.D.', who is identified in an advertisement in
The Times
in 1841: 'A young lady, being desirous of covering her dressing room with cancelled postage stamps, has been so far encouraged in her wish by private friends as to have succeeded in collecting sixteen thousand. These, however, being insufficient, she will be greatly obliged, if any good-natured person who may have these (otherwise useless) little articles at their disposal, would assist her in her whimsical project.' There were two addresses to send the stamps, one in Leadenhall Street in the City, one in Hackney. There are no further records of E.D.'s collection, nor are there pictures of her room, which must have been a shade on the dark side. These days her room would be bought by Charles Saatchi. By the following year she had competition.
Punch
noted that 'a new mania has bitten the industriously idle ladies of England ... They betray more anxiety to treasure up the Queen's heads than Harry the Eighth did to get rid of them.'

Stamp collecting as we understand it probably began in the school classroom, practised by schoolboys and encouraged by teachers of history and geography. We have long been familiar with the strange collecting passions of the playground—marbles, soldiers, Batman cards, Pogs, Pokemon—but we should ask ourselves whether the passions are more perverse than the trend observed by S. F. Cresswell, a master at Tonbridge School in the late 1850s. Cresswell informed the periodical
Notes and Queries
that a boy had shown him a collection of between three hundred and four hundred different stamps from all over the world, and he wanted to know whether there was a guide listing every stamp available and a place in London where one might buy and exchange them. Subsequent issues of
Notes and Queries
offered him no help, but S. F. Cresswell was only slightly ahead of his time, as we know from one of the earliest published histories of the hobby by William Hardy and Edward Bacon.
The Stamp Collector,
from 1898, listed the large number of philatelic societies that had sprung up since Cresswell had first looked for them forty years before. There was the Stamp Exchange Protection Society of Highbury Park, London, the Cambridge University Philatelic Society, and the Suburban Stamp Exchange Club of St Albans, Hertfordshire. There were also societies in Calcutta, Melbourne, Ontario, Baltimore and Bucharest. Hardy and Bacon identified the key moment that always defines the coming of age and ultimate validation of any serious collecting hobby: the publication of a catalogue. This told collectors that they were not alone, and it set the boundaries of a collector's ambitions.
The Stamp Collectors' Guide: Being a List of English and Foreign Postage Stamps with 200 Facsimile Drawings by Frederick Booty
was published in 1862, three years before the price-list produced by Stanley Gibbons. Booty's pamphlet consisted of fifty pages, and begins with a statement observing that 'Some two or three years ago, when collectors were to be numbered by units, they are now numbered by hundreds.'

Within five years of the Hardy and Bacon book, philatelic literature had come of age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were not only many books, albums, glossaries and catalogues, but also the surest indicator that there were considerable sums to be made from attaching oneself to the hobby's coat-tails. There were pocket magnifying glasses, many different sizes of ready-gummed mounts, a 'tuck case for the waistcoat', and an early set of tweezers called 'The Philatelists' Vade Mecum' ('An Entirely New and Original Invention for Enabling Collectors to Mount Stamps without Handling Them, a
multum in parvo
of Philatelic Requisites'). There was what was almost certainly the first philatelic novel,
The Stamp King
by Messrs Beauregard and Gorsse, an adventure in which two rival philatelists set off from New York to find the world's rarest stamp, taking in London, Paris and Naples en route, and recommended by
Vanity Fair
as 'excellently got up' and by the
Spectator
as 'a diverting extravaganza'. As for the availability of stamps themselves, in 1900 one could buy 500 stamps of Europe, all different, at 7s 6d, or 105 from Australia and 100 from Central America at the same price. One dealer offered an impressive all-world collection, already mounted on sheets, of four thousand stamps at £18.

In 1902, the prominent English philatelist Edward J. Nankivell wrote a pamphlet called
Stamp Collecting as a Pastime,
and in it he tried to identify quite what it was that caused the whole of Britain 'and almost all the world' to be in thrall to the mysteries of postage. People 'are thunderstruck at the enormous prices paid for rare stamps, and at the fortunes that are spent and made'. He observed how 'it has steadily developed into an engrossing hobby for the leisured and the busy of all classes and all ranks of life, from the monarch on his throne to the errand boy in the merchant's office'. Nankivell took his cue from physicians: a hobby was good for the heart, and no wonder it was becoming 'more and more the favourite indoor relaxation with brain-workers'. Already, he observed, the pastime had its own bons mots, and the most popular was, 'Once a stamp collector, always a stamp collector.'

By 1902, the debate over whether stamps represented a good investment had established itself on familiar tracks: Nankivell advised that rare stamps were always a good bet, while almost all of those that emerged mint from the world's post offices would be unlikely to accumulate for many years, if ever. Today this seems absurd, for we know that many late Victorian stamps are extremely valuable, particularly in unused condition; blocks or sheets of high values can provide for a secure retirement. But the author's premise was based on the belief that 'in stamps, as in every other class of investment, the foolish may buy what is worthless instead of what is valuable'. The same holds true today for those who, ensnared by the Royal Mail's literature suggesting that new stamps may be a reliable heirloom, believe that they are buying anything other than intricately designed and elaborately marketed postage. 'There are stamps specially manufactured and issued to catch such flats,' Edward Nankivell wrote more than a century ago, 'and they are easily hooked by the thousand every year, despite the continual warnings of experienced collectors.'

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.