Robert Irwin’s title, The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting, overdoes it, but this book is certainly not one for stamp collectors. They are warned off in the opening lines. The author, who died last year, was an English novelist, an Arabist, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. What he provides is a ramble centred on the culture of stamp collecting: digression is sometimes piled on digression, but most of them explore the nexus of philately to show how pervasive it once was.
Stamps were first issued in England, and as the first country to do so, Britain still acts on the principle that, unlike Johnny-come-latelies, it need not identify itself as the country of origin. (In fact a small Queen’s head is usually found in a corner.) But the tie with the Crown has been more substantial than that.
In England stamp designs have always been shown to the King, for final approval. The conservatism of George V — he preferred the most fustian of design options — meant that he was against commemorative stamps. He seemed to prefer portraits of himself — most reassuring, as he spent three afternoons a week looking at his collection: the empire in miniature. Colonial views began to appear on stamps towards the end of his reign, but his portrait was still there as a medallion, a realisation of Kipling’s “Dominion over palm and pine.” Indeed stamps were very much agents of Empire. Canada, at the height of popular imperialism (1898), issued a stamp with a map of the world, the British Empire coloured red, and the inscription, “We hold a vaster empire than has been.”
Stamps may come to be seen as the characteristic ikon of the British Empire. They first appeared in England in 1840 — and their widespread collection dropped dramatically in the 1960s and then the seventies, just as Britain was unscrambling itself from Africa. When Ghana replaced the Queen’s head on pictorial stamps with that of Kwame Nkrumah, it was regarded by some Brits as a singular act of impertinence.
Most boys (in particular) would have a stamp album, and many collected “British Empire only.” ( Stamp collecting was imperialism in lowest gear.) There were stamp dealers with shops in the CBD; Myers had a philatelic department. A tag of the time described stamp-collecting as “The King of Hobbies, and the Hobby of Kings.”
Many early issues were produced by companies who also engraved and printed banknotes. There was a palpable association with power — “prestige” was a word beloved of stamp collectors. A new issue from a remote colony like Basutoland would score a paragraph in the Times. Particularly prized in Australia were stamps overprinted “O S,” meaning on official (government) service. But apart from their coming from exotic places — overseas travel was uncommon in Australia before the second world war — there was the fact that they were colourful. (A novel by Robert Graves centred on stamp collection was simply called Antigua, Penny, Puce.) We tend to overlook this now, but until the 1950s coloured photographic prints were scarce, and in the cinema most films were black-and-white.
The fall-off in interest is implicit in the above, but a contributing factor has been the way some small countries began to produce stamps not for use, but for collectors. (South Africa went the other way, removing the price of the stamp altogether, so that the service you bought remained, even if the price subsequently went up.) A number of countries began to issue stamps featuring topics such as Cinderella, rocket science, flying saucers and pop stars. But the young had found other ways of getting their kicks.
Australia was slow off the mark in adopting this approach: in 1955, it produced just nine stamps. But Australia Post has made up for that since. While its services have led to the old term “post haste” being replaced with “snail mail,” its issues have expanded almost threefold —if one includes the Territories, whose stamps are not sold to penguins but to the public at post shops across the country. Australia Post has become so geared to the market that it now produces albums containing all the year’s issues. The tail has come to wag the dog: since the album had to be produced to catch the Christmas market, the stamps issued for the 150th anniversary of the skirmish at Eureka were brought forward (from 3 December) to November. A morbid symptom of philatulence.
It’s a strange hobby. Imperfections are prized, whether they are flaws in the printed design, or a pair of joined stamps with one upside down… and that’s without going into the mechanics of watermarks, perforations, colour variations and the like. At least postmarks, perhaps more popular than they were, speak of some reality. One of the great enticements of philately is the possibly of completeness: but as remarked by a number of people quoted in the book, a complete collection (of anything) is in some ways a corpse.
Meanwhile stamp collectors, in Britain at least, still follow the tracks laid down by the firm Stanley Gibbons & Co. in London, founded in 1856 by a man who also collected wives. (He had five.) Their famous catalogues lead Irwin to describe it as “the Vatican City of philately.” And, ridiculous though it sounds, St Gabriel the Archangel is regarded as the patron saint of philately and postal services.
People will collect anything — bottle-tops, train tickets and spinning-tops were included in a list by Italo Calvino. The critic Walter Benjamin, while despising the mechanical reproduction of art objects, could not resist collecting stamps himself. George V was not the only monarch who did so. (On the other hand, rather than seeing them as buttressing his authority, an Italian king had ordered special horseshoe postmarks made, so that the royal image would not be obliterated).
There are real surprises among the list of other famous people who collected stamps: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Edward Said, Freddie Mercury, Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband), John Lennon, Warren Buffet, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Kinsey. (Lawrence of Arabia was directly involved in the design and production of stamps for Hejaz.) Female collectors have been far less numerous, but they include Ayn Rand and the intrepid aviatrix, Amelia Earhart.
Irwin shows how stamp collecting is sometimes present in twentieth-century novels, usually as prop or plot mechanism. Collections are fought over, particularly at the moment of inheritance, or are present as a kind of security blanket, as in novels by Philip Roth and Graham Greene. In The Heart of the Matter, Greene has a man about to commit suicide write, underneath a cherished stamp, “I Love You.” The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and even Samuel Beckett also include references to stamps, but they figure more prominently — as would be expected — in crime and mystery novels.
The Madman’s Guide is exhaustive in its breadth and depth: there are scams and forgeries, people designing stamps of their own, and a passing parade of resourceful eccentrics. Adult stamp collectors have been dismissed as anal retentives, but there is often a desire to save objects, to salvage and value them. The collection created develops its own logic and order, becoming in a way timeless. It is also escapist, a private controllable world, as well as a projection of things past. Interestingly, Irwin points to the way a number of men in their forties return to the stamp collection of their boyhood, and take up philately once again. As the book closes, he hints that he just might do so himself.
In all, the book is a fascinating potpourri on the culture of stamp-collecting. Irwin sees himself in part as a compiler, and that explains why the discussion of stamp-collecting in literature goes on for a bit too long. But it does reflect the past pervasiveness of stamps. All gone now… though not quite. Classic stamps are still valued, and for some time now have been included in choice investment portfolios. •
The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting
By Robert Irwin | Pushkin Press | $36.99 | 237 pages
