The Error World (27 page)

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, through 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.

Then Brandon said he had something to show me that probably wouldn't mean a thing but excited him a great deal. As he opened his safe he said that what he was about to produce 'is much rarer than the stuff you've got, but the same period. Are you sitting down? I'm almost frightened to show you, because you'll become uncontrollable.'

There were several turns and clicks to the left and right before he removed two large envelopes. 'Look at that. Flowers from the endangered rainforest.'

I asked him what I was supposed to be getting excited about.

'This is 1960-something. Nineteen sixty-five I think. Singapore. There are probably only two sheets, and here's one of them.'

The sheet was missing a colour.

'It cost me an absolute fortune!' Brandon said. 'But I've got something even better. Do not move.' He stretched inside his safe again. 'You've heard of the Holy Grail, haven't you?'

He took out another sheet of flowers, with another spectacular missing colour.

'I may never sell it. If you look in here, Simon,' he said, motioning to the shelves in his safe, 'these are all my purchases over the last year yet to be sorted. I can barely get them all in there. And I've got another safe-ful next door.'

He showed me his Coutts cheque book. It was almost all stubs. There were two cheques left, and one of them could be for me if I wanted it. We left the price dangling. He said, with his pen poised, 'Christmas has come early for you!' And then we went for lunch.

A week earlier I had gone to see a man called Richard Watkins at Spink. Spink was established in 1666 as a goldsmith's and pawnbroker's. A century later it had a reputation as a leading coin dealer, and by 1900 it was satisfying a collectors' demand for medals. But Spink has only been auctioning stamps since 1997, when it bought the philatelic department of Christie's (formerly Robson Lowe). I had driven past its offices in Southampton Row perhaps five hundred times on my way through Holborn to the Aldwych and Waterloo. I had often wondered what went on there.

This was probably the fifth time I had visited. On three of those occasions I was a consumer, attending auctions and buying errors. Once I had gone as a journalist to talk about the nature of collecting, and now I was there as a prospective seller. On a previous visit I noticed that the ground floor was being remodelled to make it look more like a shop. You couldn't buy much apart from catalogues, but you could browse delicately lit glass cases displaying items from upcoming auctions. When I visited again a few months later, the developments were complete, and it was like walking into a Mayfair jeweller's. The stamps on show seemed even more special, and even more desirable. It was a trick of the light, a classic auctioneer's ploy. The stamps were the stamps, but you were tempted to pay more because of how you were made to perceive them. Value shone from their surface until they attained the appearance of priceless art.

'So, you're a freelance journalist with an interest in stamps,' Richard Watkins told me when I first sat opposite him at his desk. He went on, 'That's a dangerous combination.'

Watkins was fifty-seven, and had been in the stamp business for thirty years, including a lengthy period at Stanley Gibbons. He told me that he gave Mark Brandon his first job. He said he was suspicious of journalists because no matter how clearly he tried to explain something, they always got an important detail wrong, and he sometimes ended up looking foolish. A recent example was the George V Prussian Blue, an error of colour printed in 1935. George V had approved a 2½d. stamp in ultramarine, but four sheets were inadvertently printed in a far richer turquoise. The stamps sell for more than £10,000 each, and every time one of them reaches a record price at auction, Watkins gets phone calls. 'About five hundred of them, and everyone thinks they've got the rare colour, a stamp worth a fortune rather than just a few pounds.' He said he feels like hiding under his desk when the calls start coming in.

Watkins's office was upstairs, his room packed with auction catalogues from the past. As ever, the early ones were heartbreaking: a mint block of 1840 Twopenny Blues for a couple of thousand pounds. Before I discussed the possible sale of my stamps, I told him I was most interested in what will happen to stamp collecting in fifty years' time, with so few young people coming through.

'Of course, none of us actually really knows,' he said. 'Sadly, as each generation passes the interest is less and less. But it ain't going to disappear, I can tell you that. There seems to be a lot of interest in researching family history and genealogy, and I think that will lead to more of an interest in stamps. And in the upper echelons I think it will remain extremely serious and be very keenly followed.'