At the start of this book, Garfield writes very much as a man, or maybe what I mean is that he writes from a certain place of cultural masculinity that is quite foreign to me, a separate spheres sort of world that I don’t normally much think about. I wonder how much of my inability to pay attention, at first, had to do with the jarringness of that, with how stereotyped it all felt, how tied to a particular sex and age and class: male, upper-middle-class, middle age, mid-life crisis. Page 1 starts with this: “Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out.” Page 2: “When men get together to talk about their passions, we don’t just talk about what we love – our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings – but also how much these desires have cost us, and what we have lost.” This language is very gendered, and it seems very much on purpose: it’s not “when collectors get together to talk about their passions,” it’s men, and those passions, apparently, are the stereotypical straight-male ones, cars and sports and women, not books or films or art. As things progress, Garfield’s writing gets more nuanced and inclusive, gender-wise, which I appreciated. Of a board game about stamps he had as a kid: “I still have the game, and I am struck by how all the instructions describe the players as ‘he,’ and how three drawings of a dark-haired round-faced boy seemingly spellbound by the game look like me” (28). Of one reason why collectors don’t want to give interviews: “it might upset their wife or husband (usually wife) to read how much they were spending” (75). Of the beginnings of stamp collecting: “Men and women began collecting stamps in 1840, the same year that stamps began” (78).
What’s most pleasing about this book, to me, is either the very personal or the very historical: not the minutia of this stamp or that (though when I looked stamps up online—like the 1965 Post Office Tower stamp—I could sometimes see the appeal). What I liked best were the bits about Garfield’s own Penny Black and why he loves it, or the bits about the invention of the postage stamp and the time when it first went into use, or the part about about the language of stamps, how their placement denotes different things (and how the meanings of a stamp in the same position varied from, say, England to Germany). Also satisfying is some of the stuff about collecting/collectors in general. In one chapter, Garfield talks about learning about people who collect odder things than stamps, and there’s this, about a man who collected light bulbs:
He had about fifteen hundred bulbs and, the nature of this strange and fragile passion aside, seemed to be fairly normal. He did, for instance, often light up his bulbs to admire their beauty; others would regard this as sacrilege, just as collectors of rare records would never dream of actually playing them. But Tye loved the varying glows from the different filaments – the carbonised vegetable material that appeared in Edison’s day at the end of the nineteenth century, the tantalum drawn wire and then tungsten that characterised bulbs from the early twentieth century. Tye wore quite large smoked glasses and had a round balding head, and he looked like he was turning into a light bulb himself, the way owners come to resemble their pets. I’d like to think this was a common trait – the collectors of Bernard Leach pottery soon looking brown and earthy, and collectors of antiquarian books appearing dank and troubled by their spines (105)
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