Free The Error World by Simon Garfield

narrator takes a walk with her friend Neve, who tells her that her uncle Octave, who recently drowned himself in a shallow river, used to collect stamps.
    'Do you remember stamp collections?' Neve asks the narrator. 'How important those were? The rage?'
    The narrator says that she did remember, and that people still collected stamps.
    But Octave was not just any collector. He was the Ferrary of his day, a collector with everything. He kept his stamps in Pluto's bank vault, and it was worth as much as the bank's entire cash stock. He had the tre-skilling banco from Sweden, the British Guiana one-cent magenta, the one-cent Z-Grill—anything monumental in the stamp world, Octave had scaled it, and put it in one of his fifty-nine albums. But that wasn't enough for him. 'My uncle's specialty', Neve explains,'...was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting ... My uncle's melancholia drew him specifically to what are called "errors".'
    Yes, Octave collected stamps with missing text and missing colours, but he also collected crash and burn mail—mail that survived big disasters like the
Titanic
and the
Hindenburg
and Pompeii. Unfortunately, Octave took it all too far: he began to forge his own disaster mail, and that proved a disaster for Octave. After her uncle's suicide, Neve decided to sell his collection and move to Fargo.
    The characters in the short story then discuss the upside-down airplane stamp, the most famous error of all. In 1918, the US Post Office issued a set of three stamps to mark the beginning of its domestic airmail flights. Each of them featured the Curtiss Jenny biplane, but only the twenty-four-cent value was printed in two colours, dark blue (the plane) and carmine (the frame). The two colours required that the sheet of one hundred stamps be pulled through the printer twice, and on one occasion the sheet was passed through the wrong way round, resulting in the 'Jenny' appearing upside down. The man who bought the entire sheet over a post office counter in Washington DC knew the value of this great find immediately, and refused all offers until he found the promise of $15,000 from a business consortium irresistible. The sheet was immediately sold to E. H. R. 'Harry' Green, an obese millionaire with a cork leg who periodically opened the door of his car on New York's Nassau Street and made the dealers come to him. The sheet was long ago split into blocks of four and singles. In May 2002, a collector bought three of the blocks for $2.5 million.
    I would go for a drink with friends and someone would mention a stamp book they had read as a child. The poet Ruth Padel said I should look up a novel by Robert Graves—
Antigua, Penny, Puce.
I was pretty sure she had made a mistake. I knew some of Graves's work, and this didn't sound like his sort of thing at all. Besides, there was no such stamp. But here it is with me now, a book written in Majorca, the one Graves calls his only 'light' novel, about a brother and sister fighting over the ownership of a unique stamp. It is not vintage Graves. It is not even vintage stamp literature, for it crawls along like a heavy Balearic afternoon, not like Bunter or the Brandon thriller. But it does contain one bullseye passage. 'All British schoolboys of a certain age collect postage stamps,' Graves wrote in 1936,
or at least all schoolboys whose parents have a little money; below a certain social level the collecting instinct must, we suppose, be satisfied largely with cigarette pictures and gift-coupons. Schoolgirls, on the other hand ... schoolgirls do not go in for stamp collecting. In fact, they usually despise the pursuit, which is not direct and personal enough to satisfy them emotionally: if they collect anything it is signed photographs of famous actresses and actors. But they have brothers, and brothers collect stamps. So in the holidays they very often consent to lend a hand in the game. They rummage in bedroom drawers, and in their parents'