The Error World by Simon Garfield Read Free Book Online Page A

are our future. Patronising got him: 'And what can we do for the young master today?'
    'Um...'
    'For the young sir, what are your specialities?'
    I think I wanted to spill something. It was much easier buying stamps in packs at WHSmith. 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.
    Gibbons was a funny name, I agreed, but over the years I had got used to it. I told my mum the story of its founder as best I knew it; some of it was quite possibly myth, but certain elements, like the episode with the sailors and the Cape Triang-ulars, had been told so many times that they had become true. His full name was Edward Stanley Gibbons, and the first photograph of him, possibly from his late teens, shows a bulbous nose, receding hairline and a set of wild side-whiskers. He was born in 1840, the year of the Penny Black. He began collecting in the mid-1850s, encouraged by his father, a chemist. Yes, encouraged: at a time when most people threw every stamp away, and when almost every professional man would regard collecting stamps as a habit of the deranged, William Gibbons allowed his son to section off a part of his chemist's shop and start swapping with like-minded friends. This was in Plymouth; there weren't many.
    But the idea of stamps was growing. By 1856 more than twenty countries were issuing stamps, and among the most attractive were those from the Cape of Good Hope. These were triangular, and at their centre a woman reclined on an anchor. They were printed initially in London by Perkins Bacon, the same company that produced the Penny Black, and they became desirable not only because of their shape, but also because of the many variations in shades and impressions from subsequent woodblock printings. In 1863, two sailors approached Gibbons in his shop with a sack containing many thousands of these stamps they said they had won in a raffle. Gibbons bought them for £5, and by the time his first price list appeared two years later he was charging up to four shillings each. In this way he began as he wished to go on: rare stamps, rare prices. He sold his business for £25,000 in 1890, by which time its catalogues had established themselves as authoritative checklists for the world. The buyer was Charles J. Phillips, key supplier to the collector Count Philipp la Rénotière von Ferrary.
    My mother showed a vague interest in all of this, but she had other things on her mind, and 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.

    When I look at my modest collection of GB errors I feel comforted. Whenever I open the album I am delighted with the beauty of the tiny objects, and wonder about their journeys from the printing press to my albums. Because I only collect pre-decimal, the stamps transport me to a time when my father was still alive, and when my life seemed secure. The value of the stamps is an entertaining side issue, and collectors are not being honest if they claim that the cost or worth of their hobby never crosses their mind. But it is the quest for the stamps that keeps us going, not their investment potential. The rising value of rare stamps ultimately becomes a hindrance to the collector rather than a benefit. But still I think: if only my father had helped me invest £1,200 in errors in 1973. How wealthy would I be now? And how happy?
    As I think about my father dying, and my