The Error World
An Affair with Stamps
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An obsessively readable memoir about the passions—and perils—of collecting, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Just My Type.
From the Penny Red to the Blue Mauritius, generations of collectors have been drawn to the mystique of rare stamps. Once a widespread pastime of schoolboys, philately has increasingly become the province of older men obsessed with the shrewd investment, the once-in-a-lifetime find, the one elusive beauty that will complete a collection and satisfy an unquenchable thirst.
As a boy, Simon Garfield collected errors—rare pigment misprints that create ghostly absences in certain stamps. Then, in his mid-forties, this passion reignited—and it began to consume him. In the span of a couple of years, he amassed a collection of errors worth upwards of forty thousand British pounds. But as he was pursuing this secret passion, he was also pursuing a romantic one—while his marriage disintegrated.
In this unique memoir, Simon Garfield twines the story of his philatelic obsession with an honest, engrossing exploration of the rarities and absences that both limit and define us. The end result is a thoughtful, funny, and enticing meditation on the impulse to possess.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I have built up a stamp collection I can barely afford," Garfield confesses, "and it has brought me to the brink of ruin." Yet despite a significant amount of autobiographical candor, his story doesn't quite deliver the emotional wallop promised in those opening lines. His youthful enthusiasm for stamp collecting, as well as the rediscovery of that passion in his mid-40s, when he has the income to buy the stamps he always dreamed about owning as a boy, are richly detailed. The few passages depicting the personal consequences of that pursuit, however, are too detached. Several digressions into the history of stamps and stamp collecting slow the narrative, which picks up energy only when Garfield returns to his most intimate interest his focus on collecting only rare stamps that contain printing errors, for example, or tracking down the young girl who won a design competition he entered as a young boy decades ago. Garfield hits upon some interesting psychological questions about the nature of collecting all sorts of material objects, but it often feels like he is writing around the heart of his story.
