Free The Error World by Simon Garfield Page B

what I considered a remarkable thing: he sent me the stamps I had asked for without first receiving my cheque. It was like getting 'approvals' again, only this time I knew what I was doing, or thought I did. I knew David Brandon was someone I could trust. But he almost certainly knew that by sending me the stamps without prepayment he was establishing an obligation. Three modest errors were never going to be enough. I sent him a cheque for £1,200 immediately, the stamps arrived (in perfect condition, carefully packed between two pieces of stiff corrugated plastic), but I could have received them as a gift, and Brandon still would have profited. You get that at druggy parties—the first hits free and within a week you'd pay anything for more. In that simple three-stamp transaction the error world was pulling me back in.
    During one of our conversations, Brandon said I should come down one day if I was ever in the area. I could see no prospect of being in the area at any time, but I really wanted to see more of his stock, and so we fixed a date for lunch. He sent me an email: 'Dress casual, have a relaxing time.'
    Before I drove to his place, I bought some more stamps. They were beauties, though not the rarest. I bought a block of four 5d ships from the 1969 issue that sold more than 67 million; mine were missing black, which meant there was no Queen's head, value, hull or inscription, and were four out of seventy-two known. I also got what was technically called a 'wild' perforation on a block of Battle of Britain stamps, which meant that the printed stamps had somehow got caught up in the perforating machine and were cut at unique angles. And then, for £2,000, I bought a horizontal pair of stamps from 1965 that I had been keen on for a while—the ones missing olive-green, the ones without the Post Office Tower.
    ***
    'Value was immaterial to me when I began,' David Brandon told me. 'My plan when I was at school was to have one of every country in the catalogue, but that was when the simplified world catalogue was in one volume not four.' Brandon was sixty-two, small and slender with large glasses, and he was still fond of wearing jeans. He was like no other dealer I had met, in so far as he was someone I wouldn't be nervous about introducing to my friends or my family. He wasn't just into stamps. He also collected London bus and underground maps and tight clothes for his partner Linda on eBay.
    He lived and worked on the outskirts of Guildford, Surrey, in a secluded wooded area protected by steel gates and security cameras. His office contained shelves of stamp catalogues and also a large safe with many boxes of breathtaking items. He still deals in stamps from all over the world, but the booming business is in errors.
    He explained that when he was growing up in the 1950s every village had a little stamp shop, and everybody collected. '
Everybody
,' he told me again, as he knew it would be impossible to believe. Once a week his mother gave him sixpence to buy stamps from his headmaster's office during break-time, and he also bought from a shop near his home in Barnes (he said he could still smell the smoke from the dealer's cigars). He obtained the last stamp to complete his one-stamp-from-every-country-in-the-world collection in 1960, travelling to Bridger & Kay in the Strand to spend £1 5s on an item from Mafeking. Ever since, he's been collecting Boer War.
    His father was an executive at Lyon's Bakery, and when he left school at sixteen he worked for Lyon's Ice Cream. By nineteen he was a sales rep, and his earnings went on stamps. Occasionally he would place adverts in the local newspaper offering items he no longer wanted or owned in duplicate, and he found that the techniques he had honed to sell vanilla blocks could be turned effectively to a new trade. At twenty-one he began dealing in stamps from the back office of a newsagent's his father had bought in Putney. He placed adverts in
Stamp Collecting