Bestselling Books: Passion throws me in a loss
Bestselling Books: Passion throws me in a loss
It had been an innocent boyhood hobby, but when, in his forties, Simon Garfield rediscovered stamp-collecting, it spiralled into an obsession that went beyond the usual midlife search for meaning. It was costing him thousands and signalled the end of a marriage already collapsing under the strain of his love for another woman…
Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out. It is almost 1pm 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 earlier.
The passion that led me astray
It had been an innocent boyhood hobby, but when, in his forties, Simon Garfield rediscovered stamp-collecting, it spiralled into an obsession that went beyond the usual midlife search for meaning. It was costing him thousands and signalled the end of a marriage already collapsing under the strain of his love for another woman…
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer
Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out. It is almost 1pm 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 earlier.
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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 47, 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 to this 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 new 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 with the heroic name of Sir Gawaine Baillie, had built up a collection worth more than £10m, 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 on. But an affair with stamps – stamps as a mistress, just as uncontrollable as the wildest edge of a love – that might take half a lifetime to understand. My wife still doesn’t appreciate my stamps, but my marriage guidance counsellor, whom 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 30 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 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 to me. 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 90 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.
My parents had never been interested in stamps. My father died in 1973, when I was 13, and not long afterwards my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She tried to understand my collecting passion, although she obviously had more important things to think about.
Her cancer was diagnosed in hospital in 1974, but she had self-diagnosed it at least two years before. It was the classic thing of the age; I’m sure she knew what the lump meant, but she lived in fear of the mastectomy and the fall-out. Better, perhaps, to ignore it, not to worry everyone, perhaps it will stabilise. But in the dark, for certain, the truth was always there: it would never go away, it would only spread. She didn’t tell me about it as I grew up and it grew harder. I’m sure if she had told my father, he would have hastened her to hospital. It spread for two years, until its size, or the fear, or advice from others, compelled her to go to the experts.
This was in the days before routine scans and Woman’s Hour specials, the days when patients felt themselves at fault and with limited hope of survival after diagnosis. The blunt treatments – surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the slash, burn and poison with which we have become sickeningly and unwillingly familiar – had improved markedly since my mother was young, but the prognosis of two or three friends had shown her how they sometimes delayed, seldom stabilised, never reversed. In the mid-1970s, ICI was just bringing tamoxifen to market and, following her mastectomy, my mother was an early triallist.
The cancer retreated for a while. Her regular check-ups were held at the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, central London, some 200 yards from the Post Office Tower. This was the hospital where I was born. Following one consultation in the summer of 1976, we did what we always did – a trip to the Boulevard Restaurant in Wigmore Street for what they called an ‘open’ smoked-salmon sandwich – in other words not a sandwich at all – and then we did something unusual: we did the Strand.
The Strand was the stamp collector’s spiritual home. We were celebrating not only clear test results but the end of my O-levels and a downturn in the heatwave. I felt an expensive present coming on. Our first call was the post office in Trafalgar Square, the best philatelic counter in London. There were only new stamps on sale here, but the people behind the counter understood the collector’s demands. They understood them a lot more than my mother did and, as we queued up, I did my best to explain the latest thing in British stamps – gutter pairs.
‘Gutter pairs are when two stamps are separated by a strip of white paper. There are 10 gutter pairs in every sheet of 100 stamps, and the gutter, which is also perforated, runs down the middle of a sheet.’
‘What’s the point of it?’ my mother asked.
She had me there. ‘I think it has something to do with the printing process. Or the folding process.’
‘But what’s the point of collecting them?’
The man behind the counter didn’t have much of an idea either, but he knew they were in great demand. The post office in Trafalgar Square was the only place in London I knew where they didn’t sigh if you asked for particular strip or block of a stamp sh eet. The person in the queue behind the person being served understood, too, and never tutted when the wait was long. In fact, this may have been the only queue in Britain where the person behind was genuinely interested in the business being transacted ahead. Ah, you collect cylinder blocks… and traffic lights… and blocks of four. An addict loves an addict.
‘I’ll have one of everything you’ve still got on sale, please,’ I said to the man behind the counter. ‘The Telephone set, and the Social Reformers and the American Bicentennial and the new Roses set. All in gutter pairs.’
‘What do you like about stamps?’ my mother asked as we walked up the Strand. This was a tough one, too. I liked their colour and design, the fact that one could collect them and the fact that they could be worth something. I don’t think I articulated the thought at the time, but I now realise that collecting is about family. Collecting stamps is particularly about family. With stamps, one follows a tradition handed down and one makes additions, and the boundaries and conventions are fairly well established.
Deviate from the norm and you’re in trouble; people frown; societies will shun; you’ll have trouble selling on. Albums are like homes – ordered dwelling places and when they become too small to contain the collection, we buy something else, something bigger. We begin with the grandest ambition but then downsize; we find what makes us happy and pursue that. We hope that a big family and a big collection will see us through old age.
I think my mother was always in an indulgent mood when we went shopping together. I also thought that I was her favourite, and that we had the most in common. One of the most memorable things she said to me and about me – and she said it a lot – was that I had good taste. When people say this it usually means that you have the same taste as them, and in the case of my mother and me this was true. She liked to take me with her when she shopped for a party dress, and I would give her the nod or the shake.
It was like something you see in romantic comedy films – two girlfriends having a ball in a store in New York with one of them in love and the soundtrack at full promo as they giggle over something low-cut and exorbitant. That was me, as one of the girlfriends, although my mother couldn’t wear low-cut after 1974. She had a heavy foam sponge which she moved from bra to bra; unless you knew, you wouldn’t look twice. On one occasion when my dad was still alive, he had given her money to buy herself a new ring for her birthday. I must have been 11 or 12 and, rather than choose something himself, he would send me out with her. I’ve still got that ring, bought on holiday somewhere, an impressive jagged gold number like an almond nut cluster, and I still like it.
I can’t remember if I bought anything on that stamp trip beyond the new issues. Probably not, as even then I felt that it was something I should do alone. I think I would have been embarrassed to spend even £5 on something she couldn’t appreciate. Subsequently, I visited the stamp shops with my aunt Ruth and it was a bit easier with her; she didn’t really like stamps either, but she was a bit splashier with her money and was less resistant to impulse. But stamps were private things for me then and remained so for 30 years. I think I still felt ashamed of the money spent and the pursuit in general, of the lonely hobby with all its misfit connotations.
I was also frightened. I was lost in a world of experts. I didn’t believe I would be deliberately cheated, but I feared I would cheat myself. I would be offered a vast choice of Penny Reds from the 1860s and I’d be bamboozled and I’d leave the shop in a shaming panic. I had a basic catalogue, but it was far too crude a compass to steer me through so many subtleties of shade and printings and plate numbers and postmark cancellations, all of which affected price. I would have been dissatisfied with any purchase; I could never afford the best and it pained me that someone somewhere – actually, almost everyone everywhere – owned a better example.
The one place that tried hardest to dispel this feeling of helplessness was Stanley Gibbons, but I found it had the opposite effect. The weight of its history was imposing and its main showroom, with its ornate ceilings and gilt cornices, far too grand for a shop. The staff tried to entice young collectors with a huge selection of accoutrements; even if you couldn’t afford the stamps, surely the pocket money would stretch to a tin of hinges and a set of Showguard mounts. Or perhaps tweezers, or one of the new albums with names from nowhere: the Number 1, the Gay Venture, the Improved, the Safari, the Swiftsure, the Worldex, the Devon, the Exeter, the Plymouth, the Abbey Ring, the Philatelic, the Senator Standard, the Utile Standard, the Oriel, the Windsor, the Tower, the New Imperial, the New Pioneer, the New Thames, the Strand, the Nubian. They were all unbelievably similar.
In Gibbons, my stammer worsened. I wanted to look at their stock, but, like many stammerers, I found that the hardest words to say were those beginning with ’st’, such as stock or stamps. ‘Just looking’ was all I would usually manage. My mother was no help. ‘It’s a funny name, Gibbons,’ she said. She also wondered whether I would be better off collecting coins; they were older, less likely to get damaged and in your hand they felt like something.
I don’t think we went shopping for stamps again. Occasionally at home, she would show me a stamp on an old document from my father’s study. Most legal papers were paid for or sealed with stamps, the simplest form of taxation. ‘Is this a rare one?’ my mother would ask. But it never was.
As I think about my father dying, and my mother struggling with cancer, I find a new reason for my interest in collecting. Postage stamps offer one way in which we can order a world of chaos and they have the power to bring a dependable meaning to a life. Owning a piece of history, however common, however rare, may even create a fleeting purpose in this world.
Then, for about 20 years, I forgot about stamps. Or, rather, I neglected to collect them. First came exams and university, then work, then marriage and children, a mortgage. But when I was in my early forties, my interest ignited again. I can’t pinpoint the cause – perhaps it was an article in the newspapers or a browse online – but my enthusiasm returned and with it just enough disposable cash to pursue the stamps I could never afford in my childhood. Within a few weeks, I was visiting dealers and buying magazines, fantasising. I wanted the same thing now as then – stamps with errors on them, stamps with the Queen’s head missing or stamps that had been dramatically misperforated. I still dreamt of being that London schoolboy who, in 1965, wandered into a post office for the new set of stamps marking the centenary of the International Telecommunication Union, saw that the 1s 6d value was missing pink, and bought as many as he could afford, which was 20 mint copies. I knew that would never happen to me. But maybe now I could buy that error from the dealer he sold them to.
It took me a while to tell anyone of my revived passion. I could only admit it to people I could really trust, people who would not think any less of me. My children thought stamp collecting both strange and perverse and inevitably used that same phrase they employ to describe anyone over 25 in trainers and into rap music: ‘Sad.’ My wife tolerated my obsession, but seldom expressed interest. I wanted her to say: ‘Tell me about the history, the beauty, the rarity! Tell me about that one!’ but her questions were invariably focused on one thing: ‘How much was it?’ My answer was usually the same. ‘Not much, really.’ But of course it was a lot – the equivalent of a weekend away, or a beautiful painting, or a year’s theatre tickets. And the one thought I always had during these exchanges was: ‘If only I’d bought it when I was a boy.’
When I was a boy, my mother would discourage the licking of stamps the way she would discourage the eating of the ice-cream cones: just too much human dirt. I never had cause to lick many stamps in succession and when I helped my parents with their party invites or charity mailings, I learnt how to dip my fingers into a small glass dish of water and then wet the stamps. I longed for one of those dampened sponge rings they had in post offices, but they were probably limited to industrial use. Whenever my maternal grandmother kissed me pungently on the cheek, which happened much too often (she would kiss me, but also have a small handkerchief ready to wipe it off, as if she was spraying and cleaning a vanity mirror), my mother would always say: ‘You could lick a whole book of Green Shield Stamps with that!’ Irreversibly dry in all other ducts and crevices, the saliva she generated would have cooled Mount Etna.
Until December 2005, I had never, as far as I can remember, been kissed passionately on my neck. But when it finally happened I felt my world ignite and fall apart at once, and I began an affair with a woman from my past, and my marriage of 18 years dissolved. Within a year, many things that I had never had to think about before came into focus. I had to find a new place to live, a new car, a whole new way of life. I had to forge new relationships with my children and friends. And I had to sell my stamps.
When I talked to professionals at auction houses, they told me that there were three principal reasons why people sold their valuable possessions. These were the Three Ds – death, debt, divorce. Two of these suddenly became a reality and there I was with my collection of errors, calculating their worth.
My marriage had stalled long before my affair. We didn’t row, we didn’t throw things at each other – perhaps that was the problem. We seldom communicated emotionally. We ran out of projects.
We were married in August 1987, we had our first child within a year, our second two years later. We were each reliant on each other for different things, solving problems as we went, finding new projects – first our love, then our house, then bringing up our children – until we ran out of projects and the problem became ourselves. For a long while, our two boys became the great and loved ambition in our lives and when they grew increasingly independent in their mid-teens, I began to look around for new things – new ways to tell stories in my work, new ways to spend my earnings, new obsessions. My wife was the same. Her work went in new directions. My interests were mostly practical, hers increasingly spiritual. She was not interested in used postage.
My new girlfriend was never a great one for stamps either – I’m not sure that I could be attracted to any woman who was. But she was one for letters and I treasure her writing. I never corresponded much with my wife; we were together all the time, so what was the point? In the last few years, we weren’t very romantic like that, which is such a cause of sadness. But girlfriends are something else and even in the age of texting and emails, there are many passionate cards and letters. The stamps remain on the envelopes.
We had come to marriage guidance not to save our marriage but to save our souls. I wanted to understand what had happened and to do our best for our children and our future. There was a bit of shouting during the sessions, and some crying, but we made good progress.
When I told Jenny of my intention to sell my errors, she did what she invariably did best in these situations: delved for deeper meaning. She made the connection between my stamps and my missing family and she saw that their sale (the selling of my mistakes) might signify a new start for me. But what were my own errors? I did not consider the affair that broke up my marriage to be a mistake, although I regret the terrible hurt and upheaval it caused.
Several times during this period, I looked at my stamps in a new way. I began to question again why I collect at all. What was the thread that tied my love of stamps and my collection of Elvis Costello records and London Underground maps? Perhaps it was a birth defect or a disease acquired when young. I had been keeping myself well by fulfilling a physiological need, much as my younger son, Jake, injected insulin for his diabetes. There is no use asking: ‘Why me?’; a gene mutates and you just have to get on with it. There was little evidence of a genetic inheritance from my parents, but sometimes it skips a generation: my maternal grandfather, a dentist, collected teeth and dental impressions (all dentists did this to some extent, but he went beyond, taking them home and displaying them to guests after dinner in glass cases).
Jean Baudrillard has observed that ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ and sometimes this makes vague sense to me; these were the things I loved and I wanted to surround myself with them. And sometimes Baudrillard’s comment explains the whole story; afraid of losing things, I wanted to hold everything close, to say: ‘This is mine, this rare thing. You will not take it from me until I see fit.’ It had much to do with safety and security, which also explains the great importance I placed on protection and albums and cabinets.
At ground level, we are all collectors. We satisfy our thirsts and hungers in literal ways – the shopping lists add to our food stores, our wardrobes house this season’s collections. When we travel, we gather passport stamps and photographs and stories. At work, we collect contacts and experience. Freud classified three collections beyond his antiquities: his case histories; his dream texts and analyses; his Jewish anecdotes laden with world-weary lessons and wisdom. If we maintain a diary or a blog, we want to remember or be remembered, and we offer up a collection of events and opinions that record diversity.
In 2005, I sensed that things were changing for me. 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 is a substitute for sex. Even the loveliest of objects don’t offer passion back. It made me go all Lennonish 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.
Once I had decided to sell my errors, I had two options. An auction house or my main dealer, an error specialist called David Brandon. Brandon, who was in his sixties, once had a shop on the Strand, but when the rates went mad he started selling via mail order and then the internet. He lived in a vast and elegant house on the outskirts of Guildford and he kept his stamps in enormous safes under the eyes of security cameras.
I called 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, he invited me down for lunch.
Soon after my arrival, I opened my album. Brandon said: ‘I did 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.’
Linda (his girlfriend) 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?’
Brandon said that if I wanted a job I could start writing a list of his valuations. ‘Shouldn’t take very long this,’ he began. ‘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 15 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).
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.’
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.
From Joe 90 to Elvis Costello: The urge to collect
Stamps are not the only thing: the collecting gene expresses itself in many strands. In my house, there is a long wall of London Underground maps. Dating from 1902, they have spread on to the opposite wall and up the stairs – 28 framed examples of perfect form and function, beautiful in their simplicity and colour.
I don’t know why I began that collection, but I have pursued it at transport and book fairs and map and internet auctions, with the usual thrills of outbidding and being outbid, and narrowing down my wants list from Edward Johnston and Macdonald Gill designs to the first maps of Harry Beck, from the District and Central lines alone to the first unified maps of 1906, from the ones with old stations like Mark Lane and Post Office to the opening of the Jubilee extension. Visitors seem to like them and have used the latest one to get home.
In my office, I have a box of Technicolor Corgi and Dinky cars from television shows and movies, and I’d be embarrassed by them if they weren’t so attractive and exciting in their original cardboard boxes, if they weren’t so complete with their Man From U.N.C.L.E. Waverly Ring, Avengers poison-tipped umbrellas, Batman exhaust missiles and James Bond ejector seats. Besides, there was nothing unusual about these models – just the normal Thunderbirds/Joe 90/Captain Scarlet/Yellow Submarine/Saint/Kojak/MonkeeMobile spread – nothing there that most British men in their forties wouldn’t also desire.
There are two boxes of enamel Chelsea lapel badges from the 1960s and crates of rare Elvis Costello (below) records, mostly from the late 1970s when his singles had different sleeves throughout Europe and the vinyl came with different B-sides and colours. I don’t know why I wanted six different copies of ‘Less Than Zero’ and 10 of ‘Watching the Detectives’, and I never play them and seldom look at them, but I am reassured by Record Collector magazine that my eccentricities are not unique. I did not question my collecting habits, I just enjoyed them. I thought that one day I’d put everything on display and have my own little museum for the appreciative.
Extracted from The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon Garfield, to be published by Faber on Wednesday
Bestselling Books: Passion throws me in a loss. The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon Garfield. Editing by Alice Lee
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