The Error World by Simon Garfield Read Free Book Online

Philately was more than 120 years old, and lofts had long given up their treasures.
    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. Whenever anyone says 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 eleven or twelve, 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 thirty 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 i, 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.
    Gibbons occupied several shops towards the Aldwych end of the Strand, and when you walked into any of them—which took some guts for a sixteen year old, it was like entering a shop selling game-shooting guns or cigars—a man would approach with sudden confusion on his brow: part of him wanted to patronise, and part of him wanted to respond to a missive about encouraging the young, they