The Error World (7 page)

Here was that stamp again, an object more desirable than the red-headed broad being held at gunpoint on the jacket (the spine of the book showed the Blue Mauritius with a silver dagger through it, probably also not the work of a long-term, serious philatelist). The plot was distinctly hard-boiled, and a lot like Mickey Spillane. It was full of girls called Mitzi. At the start of the book, a private detective is down on his luck when an unlikely-looking client walks into his cold Chicago office. 'For a hobby I practise the art of Philately, are you with me?' the stranger asks.

'You collect postage stamps, yeah I follow.'

At this stage—the book was published in 1954, two years after Bunter—the stamp is valued at $20,000. But the stamp the client mentions is rarer still, predominantly because it only exists in fiction. Rather than a twopence blue, it is a one-penny blue. It was an error. It should have been a one-penny red, but the dyes got mixed up. According to the stranger, only one sheet was printed before the error was noticed, and all but one stamp was destroyed. This is now worth more than $150,000. And had the stranger ever seen the stamp? 'Seen it? I've owned it.' The problem was, he had needed some cash, sold the stamp, regretted it almost instantly, and now had enough 'simoleons' to buy it back. Ah, if only things were that easy. The new owner of the stamp won't sell it even for $450,000, and the stranger has gotten desperate. 'Do you realise what it is like to own something when it's the only one in the world?' he asks the detective.

'No, mebbe I don't.'

The stranger asks the detective to steal the stamp back for him, but the fee the detective wants—$250,000—is too steep. They say goodbye. And then the adventure really starts, with the detective travelling to New York to track down the dealer who bought the stamp from the stranger, and then the man who bought it from the dealer. Only problem: the man who bought it has been murdered...

***

As a stamp collector, the Blue Mauritius follows you to your grave. More exotic than the Penny Black and a hundred times rarer, it is a stamp so heavy with lore that its true history outflanks its fictitious appearances. Any account
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will describe the story of the glamorous ball held in Port Louis in 1847 by the Governor's wife Lady Gomm. The envelopes used for the invitations marked the first ever use of the one-penny orange-red and the twopence blue, and in so doing established Mauritius as only the fifth country in the world to issue stamps. The twopence stamp, which was modelled on the British Penny Red but was of far coarser design, carried an inscription on all four sides: Postage, Mauritius, Two Pence, Post Office. These days a British colony stamp would probably carry a picture of an indigenous species, or an extinct one, which in the case of Mauritius would have been the dodo. In 1847 it was a badly drawn portrait of Queen Victoria with something approaching a double chin. It is believed 500 were printed of each value, but only twenty-six or twenty-seven are known to have survived. The stamps continued to be worth twopence (or less because they were used) until about 1865, when a market for them was established by French collectors. As Detective Brandon was informed by the New York dealer he met on his travels, the stamp has 'no legal value whatsoever ... the immense value that attaches to it is given only by the few specialists for that kind of thing that there are in the world'. This is the essence of all stamp collecting, indeed of collecting anything: you don't have to be one of the Duveen brothers to know that a stamp, like everything else you may purchase at auction, is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.

Part of the initial allure in France—apart from the fact that these stamps were a vivid fresh discovery in a flourishing new hobby—was that it contained the words 'Post Office', whereas the stamps printed from an improved engraving the following year in far greater numbers bore the words 'Post Paid'. It was also very rare, as the vast majority were thrown away in Mauritian waste bins well before new ballgowns were ordered for Lady Gomm's party (1,000 'Post Office' stamps were printed in 1847, whereas it is believed 100,000 of the 'Post Paid' stamps were printed between 1848 and 1859). And in this way the stamp became a holy grail. One id used stamp surfaced in 1869 in Bordeaux and was sold to a female dealer named Madame Desbois. It was then bought by Moens along with some other stamps, who sold it on to a collector for about £10 in 1870. In 1897 a dealer bought the stamp as part of this man's entire collection, valuing it at about £1,200. In 1901 it was bought by the Berlin Reichspostmuseum, where it was placed in a glass-fronted display frame, surviving the Second World War first in the museum's vaults and then in a mineshaft in Eisleben. In 1977, a year after a former US army soldier had offered the frame for sale to the London philatelist Robson Lowe (who reported this offer to Interpol), the soldier surrendered it to the US Customs Service. Following reunification, it was returned to a postal museum in Bonn, and it is now on display at its new permanent home (until history pulls it away ...) in the Museum fur Post und Kommunikation in Berlin. And no doubt those who see it report its bearing as 'luminous', for nothing adds ardent light to a stamp better than a brilliant past.

One twopence specimen, unused, slightly damaged and repaired, followed a similar route from Bordeaux to Madame Desbois, and then to J. B. Moens. Moens sold it to Count Ferrary in 1875, for 600 francs (about £24). In 1886 Ferrary swapped the stamp with T. K. Tapling, whose collection was bequeathed to the British Museum after his death in 1891. This was the one that really caught my eye.

Tapling and Ferrary were the two giants of nineteenth-century collecting, and they couldn't have been more different. Tapling was seven years younger, educated at Harrow, a Member of Parliament, a cricketer (he played one match for the MCC), fond of cravats. Though born to good stock and great wealth, Ferrary was practically feral.

He was born illegitimate in 1848 and brought up in Germany and France. He began collecting at the age of ten. He was a serious boy, and a sensitive one: he reportedly suffered a great deal when he heard of the humiliation inflicted upon the Austrian armies by Napoleon III at Solferino. His ancestors were also collectors, and their main interest appeared to be collecting money. His maternal grandfather, a Genoese banker, was said to have died of starvation when he deposited himself in a vault with his gold but failed to take the key to let himself out. The banker's daughter, Ferrary's mother, the Duchess of Galliera, was only given the key to her husband's private library shortly before he died, and when she entered she found a great many shelves of bound volumes containing government bonds, some £12 million in total.

And so it was, at the death of his mother in 1888, that Count Ferrary found himself suddenly able to acquire all the things he dreamed of as a child. His inheritance was $25 million. What he dreamed of was something every modern collector can never dare to dream—the feat of completion. With the possible exception of the King of England, no one else would ever entertain such ambitions again. Ferrary was to be thwarted in his aim: even in 1888, forty-eight years after the Penny Black, it was already impossible to collect everything. Even if you had the money, some things were just not available. But Ferrary tried.

He had several important dealers, including J. P. Moens and Pierre Mahe, the latter becoming the keeper of his collection in Paris as he travelled throughout Europe on his quest for more stamps. He desired to buy every unique and legendary rarity in the world—the five-cent dull-blue Boscawen Postmaster stamp; the Kiautschou five-pfennig double-printed with 5fP rather than 5Pf; the 1851 Hawaiian two-cent blue, the 1856 British Guiana one-cent black on magenta, the Swedish tre-skilling banco of 1855 (yellow, error of colour, the only known example that wasn't the intended green).

Like most collectors, Ferrary thrilled as much to the chase as the conquest. He bought them every way you can imagine and a few more besides, paying far over the odds to happy dealers. At one stage he owned four copies of the Blue Mauritius. The stamps were housed at 57 rue de Varenne, in a private wing of a palace occupied by the Austrian ambassador. His collection was rarely seen by visitors, but one who did gain entrance was Charles J. Phillips, another of Ferrary's principal dealers. He described a room covered on three sides by cupboards with shelves, the shelves containing 'stamps all mounted on strips of stout paper'; they were not in albums but in bundles organised alphabetically, and some of the bundles were distinctly dusty. Elsewhere there were tall piles of discarded albums and paper sheets containing the unwanted duplicates from the many collections he had purchased to plunder a few rare specimens. Behind Mahe's desk stood a board with banknotes nailed to it in various denominations: 50,000 francs was allocated each week for the purchase of new stamps. At one stage in the 1890s, Ferrary's relatives became so alarmed at the amount he was spending on stamps that they decided to use the French courts to slow him down. His relatives claimed he had gone insane; to prove otherwise, Ferrary enrolled in a law course at the University of Brussels, obtaining his degree after five years. He also gave his 'solemn word' that 'in no case and under no pretext whatever I would make a debit and never purchase anything for which I could not pay cash'.

According to a book by Gustav Schenk,
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the Count never found peace during his work on the ultimate collection; he must have realised that he could never get it all, and he didn't know enough about his quarry to value them beyond their monetary value. Accordingly, he was preyed on by scam artists who prepared fakes specifically for his visit. These stamps, unique in themselves, are now known as Ferrarities. But there is some evidence he knew what he was doing. He once spent a large amount with a dealer in Berlin, and on his return to Paris he was informed that almost all of his purchases were duds. 'Do you think I had not seen that?' Ferrary is reported as asking. 'The man wanted money badly, and had nothing else, so I had to take the forgeries.' On one occasion he bought an item from the known forgers Benjamin and Sarpy as it was being prepared in the back room.

Ferrary's zeal and compassion hinted at a singular ambition: immortality. 'The philatelic memorial to which I have devoted my entire life', he wrote in his will, 'I bequeath with pride and joy to my beloved German fatherland.' He was writing in the middle of the First World War; he died in 1917. He had once hoped to leave his GB and Colonies stamps to the British Museum, where they would have sat alongside Tapling's, but the war changed his plans. His stamps, which he wished to be known as the Arnold Collection, were seized by the French as war reparations, and auctioned at various sales between 1921 and 1923. The sales provoked feverish bidding, and many items reached record prices. Bidders came from all over the world, attracted not only by the rare lots, but also by the stories attached to them. The total value of the sale was £402,965.

Throughout my new stamp frenzy, it seemed that every publication I picked up had stamps in it. Count Ferrary would have been pleased with
The Plot against America,
the 2004 novel by Philip Roth, and certainly he would have loved its jacket. This displayed a one-cent stamp with a pleasant green image of Yosemite in California, or it would have been pleasant had it not been overprinted with a heavy black swastika. The novel imagines a scenario in which the isolationist Jew-baiting Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Another nightmare occurs early in the book, when the young male narrator has a dream that his prized set of 1934 National Parks stamps have all been vandalised with the swastika. Earlier in the dream, the portrait of George Washington on a set of stamps had been replaced with that of Adolf Hitler. Stamps are everything for this seven year old; inspired by the widely publicised collecting passions of Roosevelt, he carries his stamp album with him everywhere, much as other children his age carried teddy bears. I had no trouble imagining myself in his shoes.

A short while after reading this I picked up a copy of
The New Yorker,
and there was a short story by Louise Erdrich called 'Disaster Stamps of Pluto'. Pluto is not the planet (as was), but a backward town in North Dakota. The narrator takes a walk with her friend Neve, who tells her that her uncle Octave, who recently drowned himself in a shallow river, used to collect stamps.

'Do you remember stamp collections?' Neve asks the narrator. 'How important those were? The rage?'

The narrator says that she did remember, and that people still collected stamps.

But Octave was not just any collector. He was the Ferrary of his day, a collector with everything. He kept his stamps in Pluto's bank vault, and it was worth as much as the bank's entire cash stock. He had the tre-skilling banco from Sweden, the British Guiana one-cent magenta, the one-cent Z-Grill—anything monumental in the stamp world, Octave had scaled it, and put it in one of his fifty-nine albums. But that wasn't enough for him. 'My uncle's specialty', Neve explains,'...was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting ... My uncle's melancholia drew him specifically to what are called "errors".'

Yes, Octave collected stamps with missing text and missing colours, but he also collected crash and burn mail—mail that survived big disasters like the
Titanic
and the
Hindenburg
and Pompeii. Unfortunately, Octave took it all too far: he began to forge his own disaster mail, and that proved a disaster for Octave. After her uncle's suicide, Neve decided to sell his collection and move to Fargo.

The characters in the short story then discuss the upside-down airplane stamp, the most famous error of all. In 1918, the US Post Office issued a set of three stamps to mark the beginning of its domestic airmail flights. Each of them featured the Curtiss Jenny biplane, but only the twenty-four-cent value was printed in two colours, dark blue (the plane) and carmine (the frame). The two colours required that the sheet of one hundred stamps be pulled through the printer twice, and on one occasion the sheet was passed through the wrong way round, resulting in the 'Jenny' appearing upside down. The man who bought the entire sheet over a post office counter in Washington DC knew the value of this great find immediately, and refused all offers until he found the promise of $15,000 from a business consortium irresistible. The sheet was immediately sold to E. H. R. 'Harry' Green, an obese millionaire with a cork leg who periodically opened the door of his car on New York's Nassau Street and made the dealers come to him. The sheet was long ago split into blocks of four and singles. In May 2002, a collector bought three of the blocks for $2.5 million.