The Error World (20 page)

This room contained stamps, stamp designs, and stamp designs that were never issued. My tour guide talked about the ideal temperature control of 17.5 degrees Celsius and 50 per cent humidity, and said that the contents were so valuable that every time a staff member visited the stamp room there had to be another staff member present at all times. And then both of them would be continually filmed by the security cameras. It so happened that my guide had a phobia about lifts, and she had to run up or run down the stairs to be there whenever the lift opened with a new batch of visitors. I told her about Melanie Kilim and the Post Office Tower and I think it made her feel better.

A few weeks later, at the end of May 2006, I flew to Washington DC for the biggest stamp show in the world that year, and probably of all time. The World Philatelic Exhibition was held every ten years, and was billed in its advertisements as 'Stamps—and so much more!' Actually, it was almost all stamps. The big marketing plan was to encourage attendance from people who did not normally think of themselves as collectors, especially the young. There was to be a personal appearance from someone dressed as Postman Pat, and also from someone dressed as his American equivalent Mr Zip. Benjamin Franklin would also show up, and there would be special children's competitions and stamp camps, but in the main it would be men with grey hair and their gigantic wives.

It was a wonderful show. About 85,000 people turned up to buy from 160 dealers and see the 3,800 exhibition frames. Every obsession was catered for, and although the show lasted a week, no individual could possibly hope to study them all. Among the leading competitive displays from British exhibitors, all of which won either a gold medal or a 'large' gold medal from the international judges, there were entries on Norfolk postal history, the British occupation of Iraq, Zanzibar postal dues and a thematic show on bicycles.

The exhibits were open to all, but in another section of the Convention Center there was a vast amount of meeting behind closed doors. Clubs and societies had chosen the Washington show as an ideal place to hold their annual get-togethers, and the breadth of their coverage would have astonished the first Victorian collectors. Sitting down on just one day were the Haiti Philatelic Society, the Hong Kong Study Circle, the Society of Israel Philatelists, the Scandinavian Collectors Club, the International Society of Guatemala Collectors, the Canadian Society of Russian Philately, the Ottoman and Near East Philatelic Society, and the Scouts on Stamps Society.

The problem was, you attended these and you'd miss many other things, including workshops and presentations called 'What's in Your Attic?', 'Thinking about Thailand' by T. P. McDermott and 'Collecting Zeppelin Mail for the Price of Lunch' by Bob Horn. I was sorry to miss the talk by Dr Lubomir Floch and Miroslav Langhammer entitled '1993 Division of Czechoslovakia Post into Czech and Slovak Posts', but happy to be elsewhere for 'How to Design an Israeli Stamp with Surprise Guests'. I was fairly sure I knew who these surprise guests were going to be. They were going to be folk dancers. Every time Israel presents itself on an international stage there is an inevitable planeload of people in national costume dancing to 'Hava Nagila' or a song about the destruction of the Second Temple. In a small meeting room there will always be a lot of pressure to participate.

Later in the week it turned out that Bob Horn had a rival, a German man called Dietmar who was holding a talk on how to build a good Zeppelin collection, including 'crash and burn' mail from airships that were destroyed in combat. His talk began the awful way, with Dietmar asking everyone in the room to introduce themselves. 'I'm Bob Stranks from Albuquerque, I'm Jim Banks from New Falls...' Most of them seemed to know each other from specialist Zeppelin and crash mail seminars in the past. 'I'm Simon Garfield from London.' A couple glanced round with a look that said 'interloper'. I could definitely hear people whispering, 'Did he say Simon Garfunkel?'

'The main thing', Dietmar said, 'is research. But good research. It's no point doing what somebody else has just done. I mean you could do Switzerland, which is a lot of fun for you, but there's a catalogue zis zick [he held his thumb and forefinger about four inches apart]. So do something original—maybe about rates, or how the letter got to the airship, or perhaps collect letters from the staff on board, and when you have done your research please share it.' He also said that you can collect for twenty years, but it's only when you spend six months writing it up for an exhibition that you really begin to understand what you have.

The best crash and burn mail can reach colossal prices, and there were several expensive items on offer in the show's many auctions. They appeared in catalogues next to rarities from every nation, and the auctions were the first I had attended where the live action was occasionally interrupted by a 'ding' from the loudspeaker at the side of the auctioneer—the sign that someone had upped the bid on the Internet. No longer did one have to sweat it out in the room or on the phone; now one could buy a Cape of Good Hope fourpence woodblock, vermilion, error of colour, large margins, central faults and creased though not visible on the face—a rare opportunity to own a great rarity for £40,000—just by sitting in an office or by a pool or Brent Cross car park and clicking Submit.

But the very rarest items were not for sale at any price with any technology. The Court of Honour, guarded by two members of the Washington police force, contained items collectively valued at millions of dollars, and few of them were pretty. But they were each unique, and they told stories that have passed into folklore.

My favourite was the Alexandria 'Blue Boy', a fifty-cent provisional stamp from 1847, the year that official government stamps were first issued in the United States. The stamp was issued on blue paper, and carries a circle of forty rosettes around the lettering 'Alexandria Post Office—Paid'. It is the only known example, loaned by a Swiss collector who agreed to let Washington have it for a week so long as Washington insured it for $5 million. But its appearance at this show was doubly unique. The stamp was attached to an envelope, and, for the first time after years of detective work, the innards of the envelope were also on display. This happened to be a love letter, of the most gentle sort, sent from a man called James Wallace Hooff to Jannett Hooff Brown. It was a forbidden love. They were twenty-four and twenty-three, and they were second cousins. They were also of different denominations, Presbyterian and Episcopalian. They lived in the same street in Richmond, Virginia, and the letter that was sent by James Hooff from Alexandria at the end of 1847 contained news of family events. By contemporary standards there isn't much in his writing to set the heart aflame, but there is a soft longing beneath the lines 'whenever you think you can write me a line without exciting the attention of your coz. Wash, do so, for it gives me a great deal of pleasure to receive a letter from you, even if it is only a short one'. He closes with a reminder of their fragile position: 'Bye the bye, I believe Aunt Julia has an idea of my writing you; for two or three days after my first letter to you, she wrote Mother. And Mother laughingly remarked "That if there was any love going on Aunt Julia was sure to find it out," and while making that remark, I think, looked at me, but I continued reading, as if what she said did not apply to me in the least.' (Six years later, with Aunt Julia no longer on the scene, they married and had three children.) Hooff signs off, 'Yours with the greatest affection, W', and below this lay an instruction: 'Burn as Usual.'

The other great American gem, valued at $3 million, was the 1868 one-cent Z Grill. This was once the property of Bill Gross, the man who we earlier saw auctioning off his Penny Blacks for Médecins sans Frontières. Gross is a sort of philatelic Barnum, pleased with what stamps can bring to the world of entertainment. In November 2005, Gross bought the unique plate-number block of the inverted twenty-four-cent Jenny airmail issue from 1918, the famous upside-down biplane error. He paid almost $3 million, but the purchase was only the means to an end. What he really wanted was the Z Grill—a blue, used line-engraved stamp showing Benjamin Franklin, valuable because it had a particular waffle-like security impression on the back to aid the absorption of cancellation ink.

Only two are known. The first is in the New York Public Library, and the second was bought at auction in 1998 for $935,000 (the purchaser, Don Sundman of the Mystic Stamp Company, encouraged his eleven-year-old son to raise his bidding paddle). Bill Gross owned every nineteenth-century American stamp apart from the Z Grill, and organised the swap of his Jenny error block to complete his collection. And so here it was in Washington, heavily guarded, sealed beneath perspex and glass, the most expensive single stamp in the world.

With all this on display, you needed a proper opening ceremony, and the Americans tend not to let you down on this sort of thing. The official start of the show included a procession of dignitaries from all over the world. In a written message, President George W. Bush sent his very best. We stood for a parade of flags, led by two little drummer boys from a company called Children of the American Revolution. We witnessed the dedication to the new Wonders of America stamps. We saw Doug Foote, a professional fancy dancer, jig his way across the stage to the beat of native drums and the White Oak Singers. Towards the end there was a young boy with Crohn's disease whose wish it was to meet the Postmaster General.

Sitting behind me at this ceremony was a plump, balding, genial-looking man with large glasses called Michael Sefi. He appeared both interested and bemused by the palaver, and probably rather pleased that they did things differently where he came from. He came from St James's Palace, the place where he holds what may be the best job in world philately—looking after the stamps of Queen Elizabeth II.

As Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection, Michael Sefi has responsibility for many hundreds of albums of GB and Commonwealth material. Effectively he looks after the stamps belonging to the woman who appears on all of them since 1953. There are so many stamps that they have never been counted, but they have been divided for ease of reference: the 328 red albums are the most valuable, containing material predominantly amassed by King George V. The blue collection contains material from the reign of King George VI, and the green collection covers the current reign. Collectively the albums make what is the most comprehensive collection of British and Commonwealth material in the world, and the most valuable. Most of the valuable objects in the royal palaces are held by the Queen in trust for her successors and the nation, unlike the Royal Philatelic Collection, which is owned by her privately. It is with her personal permission that it may be viewed by researchers and mounted in travelling exhibitions. One such exhibition had accompanied Michael Sefi across the ocean to Washington, and it contained several items to make you fall to your knees. There was an example of the 'Rainbow' proofs sent to Rowland Hill by the printers Perkins, Bacon and Petch suggesting possible alternative colours to the Penny Black, including the red shade that was finally selected. There were fascinating proofs and errors from the Falklands, Cayman Islands, Jamaica and British Guiana. But the most mouth-watering item was also one of the Royal Collection's latest acquisitions, the 'Kirkcudbright' cover from 6 May 1840, a wrapper bearing a block of ten lightly cancelled Penny Blacks sent on the first day of issue. There are about seventy known first-day covers from this date, but this is the only one with more than two stamps, addressed simply to James Burnie Esq., Kirkcudbright (pronounced kir-cu-bree). It is worth, at a conservative estimate, about £500,000.

Sefi spent the first days of the exhibition milling around the Court of Honour and the National Postal Museum stands talking to old friends and answering questions from the public. He explained that the Kirkcudbright cover was bought in 2001, but only after discussions with the Privy Purse concluded that it would be necessary to offset the cost by selling some duplicates. He also talked about the dangers of light, and the ideal 'five-foot candle standard' (or fifty lux) that protects fugitive inks from fading or becoming unstable. This might be a little dim for those familiar only with less valuable displays, but it is a key factor in ensuring the protection of the rarest material. The low light also generates a certain hushed reverence around the stamps, something their owners and trustees are keen to encourage.

A while later I called on Michael Sefi in his office in St James's Palace. He had emailed me a hand-drawn map to help me find it, and an accompanying note stating, in capitals, 'Do not go to Buckingham Palace—we are not there!'

The office resembled a collector's study, the walls heavy with auction catalogues and reference books. There was also somebody called Colette Saunders in the room, from the Buckingham Palace press office, presumably installed to ensure I didn't ask anything unseemly about the Queen and to limit the chances of Sefi revealing any terrible secrets. In fact, he had met the Queen only fleetingly; her interest in philately was not quite what her grandfather's had been.

I had come to talk about the responsibility of managing the most impressive private stamp collection in the world, but I also wanted to ask about a collector's motivation, and in so doing learn more about myself.

Sefi is not only a curator and a philatelic scholar, but a collector too, and the arc of his passion seemed to reflect my own. He was born in London, and began collecting as a schoolboy in the late 1940s. He was particularly interested in the pictures on colonial stamps, and he remembers a lot of landscapes and animals from exotic places he had no expectation of ever visiting. 'Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda,' he says. 'And Fiji, for example. Who on earth went to Fiji? To a ten year old I don't think jingoism is a word that means very much, but even in the late forties large parts of the world were red on the map. And so you saw stamps with the monarch on, George VI and then the Queen, and this somehow connected back to the home country.' His father wasn't a collector, but his grandfather was, and although he sold his main collection just after the war, there was a second or third collection which he gave to his grandson, mostly poor and used copies of Great Britain and Commonwealth. 'But they delighted my eye.'