Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Error World: An Affair with Stamps

Rate this book
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 adults 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. When this passion reignited in his mid-forties, it consumed him. In the span of a couple of years he amassed a collection of errors worth upward of forty thousand pounds, pursuing not only this secret passion but a romantic one, as his marriage disintegrated.

In this unique memoir, Garfield twines the story of his philatelic obsession with an honest and 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.

255 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

6 people are currently reading
273 people want to read

About the author

Simon Garfield

36 books332 followers
Simon Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He was educated at the independent University College School in Hampstead, London, and the London School of Economics, where he was the Executive Editor of The Beaver. He also regularly writes for The Observer newspaper.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
13 (10%)
4 stars
39 (31%)
3 stars
46 (36%)
2 stars
20 (16%)
1 star
7 (5%)
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for Gerry.
Author 43 books118 followers
September 9, 2021
Whether one is a stamp collector or not, 'The Error World' is a book that brings home the love of collecting and why the desire is there to own something that one deems beautiful and which is the larger scheme of things could bring in a handsome profit - or occasionally a loss - at some future date. Profit is, of course, one reason to collect, but the main one is to have completeness or to own something that very few other people own.

In a most readable account of his collecting life, Simon Garfield relates his experiences, particularly with various dealers that he has bought from, and how he developed a liking for those stamps that had mistakes on them from the original printing. When he began his collecting those errors were not very highly regarded and could be picked up reasonably cheaply but as time progressed it was realised how uncommon, I hesitate to use the word rare but it also applies, such stamps were and how costly, sorry, very costly, they could become.

He developed a taste for these and would hunt them down wherever he could until he gave up the philatelic hobby and put his stamp albums away while he developed his working life. Then, in his mid-forties, he revived the hobby and went almost fanatically into collecting the error stamps once more. He frequented the up-market stamp outlets, such as Stanley Gibbons, as well as those where he was more likely to pick up a bargain, such as the market that once ran under Charing Cross Bridge on a Saturday [I was once a great philatelist and that was a place I frequently visited].

Consequently his collection grew in number and also in value. His passion was still there but a time came when he needed money to finance various projects, not least of all his divorce so he went through the painful process of selling off his collection. He drew a considerable sum for it but the loss still left him somewhat downhearted.

He couldn't resist the collecting bug though and he looked at purchasing vintage motor cars but rather than splash out a large sum on one car, he resisted! Even though his stamp collection had been broken up he kept in touch with one or two of the dealers that he had dealt with and his conversations with them make interesting reading. One question he does ask is where is philately going; he suggests that as time goes on the number of people taking up the hobby are getting fewer and fewer and the age of those participating is growing. I have a dear friend who is an avid philatelist and he has been saying this to me for a number of years, citing the fact that the number of stamp societies has gone down considerably (Garfield makes the same point both in the UK and internationally) and that he, just arrived at 60, is by far the youngest in the last one that exists in our area.

Garfield tells many interesting stories, not least of the development of the evolution of the Queen's head on stamps (or even not on the stamps in some errors!) and of the Royal collection that began with George V who was an avid collector and continues with Elizabeth II, who although she does allow the Keeper of her stamps to occasionally add to the collection and is quite happy to loan out expensive items to various international shows - complete with guardians to see that they are not stolen - has very little interest in the day to day maintenance of the collection.

Garfield's love of the hobby, particularly his stories of the errors on the stamps of Great Britain, and the pleasure it has given him comes shining through and, if one is a collector of anything, his views can be related to whatever it is that one collects - books in my instance!
53 reviews
June 17, 2021
As someone who doesn't really collect anything, this book was an eye-opening look into the world of collectors.

The author talks about the tension between collecting purely for the aesthetic value of these tiny artworks and coldly investing in items that are likely to appreciate over the years (merely 'owning' rather than collecting), though the author does admit that if stamps didn't have any monetary value, he wouldn't be interested in them.

This book also has some fascinating tidbits about the history of pre-paid postage - I had no idea that before stamps were issued, the people who recieved the letters were responsible for paying the postage, and this was paid at the door to the mail carrier.

It did wander off into some long and only semi-relevant tangents, like a quest for a particular piece of pottery, and trying to decide whether to buy a car. And the foreshadowing about heading to marriage counseling with his stamp collection and repeated mentions of 'if the little women only knew how much the men were spending' never amounted to anything.

Three stars. Minus one star for the thump of misogyny throughout the book that made it, frankly, difficult to read. You can't sigh about the lack of young people taking up the hobby and then belittle half of all young people.
Profile Image for Jill Meyer.
1,188 reviews122 followers
August 7, 2022
Another reviewer of this book on AmazonUSA - who gave the book three stars - asks a question of what "conceit" a person has to have to think their lives are interesting enough to write a memoir and have other people pay money to read it. It's a good question - very good, and thank you "Mendicant Pigeon" for asking it - and actually applies to any memoir, not just this one.

Simon Garfield has written many interesting books about a variety of subjects - ranging from the color mauve to AIDS in Britain to attitudes in Britain during and after WW2 to his latest, a book on type fonts. He's a clever writer about subjects that are not of general interest but are of interest to a large enough subset of readers who have the coin to buy his books and the time to read them. Along the way, he managed in his personal life to lose three members of his family - parents and older brother in the span of a few years - and to marry, father two sons, and then have an affair and divorce his wife. During this busy time, he also collected stamps - off and on - and returned to his collecting ways during his marital problems.

Okay, returning to Mendicant's question, is this the stuff of memoir? To me the answer is "yes", because this is Simon Garfield's memoir and he has addressed odd stuff before - though not in a personal way of a memoir. Memoirs are "sticky wickets", the author must know that most people don't much care about an author's life and attendant joys and woes. If it's a famous person - say Bill Clinton - there's more interest in the memoir because he's FAMOUS. (As an aside, as much as I liked Bill Clinton, I found his memoir one-big-yawn because he seemed to include everything with little editing. I like "editing"...) The best memoirs - to me, at least - are those by little-known people. We don't go into them with any preconceived notion of the person we're reading about.

So, yes, I think Simon Garfield's memoir, "The Error World: An Affair about Stamps, is a well-written read. If you care in the very least about the intricacies of stamp collecting - actually, about collecting anything - and don't mind reading about a man's mid-life crisis being told in the terms of stamp collecting, this is a book for you. If you don't care a bit about mid-life crises, then don't pick this book up. It's actually very easy.

And thanks again, Mendicant, for asking...
104 reviews1 follower
June 28, 2019
This book is an offbeat introspection dedicated to the proposition that imperfection increases value. How closely I identify with it! Plus, its central theme is philately, which has been a lifelong passion of mine. More to the point, the author gets inside & analyzes the mind of the compulsive collector, a characteristic I share with him.
271 reviews2 followers
April 12, 2019
A memoir that is only partly about stamps, but also reflects the author’s trying to understand his own life.
Profile Image for Consuelo Bravo.
2 reviews
December 27, 2020
Interesting topic, but treated way too much as a personal issue, and does not constitute a novel. Just a personal story.
56 reviews
June 6, 2023
As a stamp collector this was a somewhat fun read but would probably have little interest to a non philatelist. It is also biographical about the author’s personal life.
Profile Image for Heather.
798 reviews22 followers
August 5, 2009
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 (p 105)
Profile Image for Mike Van Campen.
50 reviews16 followers
February 9, 2009
Having read _Mauve_, I looked forward to reading Simon Garfield's latest. While I enjoyed many parts of his new book, it just never seems to come together into a cohesive narrative. Much of the book is a memoir of Garfield's account of his early years as a philatelist and his rediscovery of the hobby (obsession?) in his recent years, as well as information on his infidelity and the breakup of his marriage. The bits about his early fascination with misprinted stamps (errors) is quite interesting, but more for the information we learn about stamps than anything else. This unfortunately is the pattern of the whole book. Garfield intersperses lots of information about stamp collecting and collecting in general and introduces us to a lot of famous (and other) philatelists in the course of the narrative. These often veer away from memoir and are not really artfully intertwined with the personal story he is telling. Often, it feels that facts and information are used to inflate what would otherwise be a very short memoir.

Having said that, I will share that I, a non-philatelist, learned much about the hobby. I also appreciated Garfield's observations on what drives folks to collect. I almost wish this were more of a straight history of UK stamps and philately; that is where Garfield is at his best. It is the attempt--an admittedly difficult one--to unite this material with his personal memoir that seems less than successful. As I read, I kept thinking back to books by John McPhee and how seamlessly he intertwines a personal narrative, which he never forces, with background facts and historical information. It seems this was what Garfield is striving for here; however, the seams are obvious and the narrative a bit rough.
Profile Image for Claire Hall.
67 reviews22 followers
March 30, 2009
What motives drive the collector? When does collecting become an obsession? These questions are at the heart of Simon Garfield's memoir, "The Error World." Garfield collected stamps as a boy in England, putting aside the hobby in his late teens. He developed a special fondness for philatelic printing errors--in most cases, stamps missing one or more colors and thus with incomplete designs. These rare, valuable pieces of paper were out of his reach as a youngster, but when the urge to collect was suddenly rekindled in his adult years, he could at last indulge his passion.

The book opens with a memorable scene. Garfield is standing outside a marriage counselor's office in London, an album with stamps worth 40,000 pounds (about $57,000) under his arm. His marriage is about to collapse due to an affair. We travel back in time to learn what led him to this moment of crisis. Although there's a lot of stamp history between these covers, that's not what this memoir is truly about. It is an entertaining, thought-provoking exploration of the heart and mind of a collector. (It turns out stamps aren't the only thing Garfield has collected--he's collected bus schedules, train tickets, and many other things). My only wish is that he had more fully delivered on the promise of that memorable opening scene. Surprisingly, we don't get a lot of detail on the assembly of that expensive collection, and we learn virtually nothing about the affair. In the final pages, we feel Garfield's pain as the expense of his divorce forces him to sell his beloved stamps. And we aren't surprised in the least when the book closes--with him contemplating beginning a new collection.
Profile Image for Kate.
270 reviews3 followers
October 6, 2011
I laughed when I read the opening sentence of The Error World: An Affair with Stamps: "Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies." Especially when it comes to stamp collectors. I'm not married to a stamp collector, but my father had a life-long affair with stamps. Stamps were his first love, and nothing, not even his love for my mother, came close.

The book is a little uneven in the telling of the author's story: growing up collecting stamps, then putting them away for years, and years later taking up the hobby again. And finally, giving them all up to pay for his divorce. It turns out there are the "three D's" that determine when a stamp collection is sold: Debt, Divorce, and Death.

As my father's daughter, I am well acquainted with the "language" of stamp collecting: errors, perforations, tongs, hinges, gutter pairs, and on. It occurred to me while reading this book that if one is not familiar with this lingo, this might not be an enjoyable read.

On the other hand, the history of how stamps began was interesting, as well as the author's quest to find out why people collect anything, and if the hobby of stamp collecting has a future or not. Maybe it's time for me to go look at the stamps my father loving collected for me, all of which I still have, though I haven't looked at them in years.
552 reviews
November 30, 2017
Took me forever to read this book. Not because it wasn't good, but because British authors write about their everyday lives and I have no idea what they're talking about. Their foods, stores, media personalities, neighborhoods, etc. have no meaning to me and I spend a lot of time Googling. So I'd read a chapter, do a bunch of Googling and not get back to it for a while. And if Garfield had been American I would know so much more about his stamp collection. I actually enjoyed the stamp talk because stamp collecting is a hobby I've dabbled with since childhood. If he had been going on and on about the Columbian Exposition stamps or many other US stamps, I'd know exactly what he was talking about. I don't know much about stamps from the UK other than Machins so I couldn't get too excited about the issues he's talking about. Plus he likes to keep repeating that women aren't into stamp collecting. Am I a weird exception? I don't know, but it was annoying. I'm interested in reading some of his other stuff despite how long it took me to get through this one.
Profile Image for Ron.
Author 13 books79 followers
November 9, 2008
I tended to zone out slightly when Garfield hunkered down into the finer details of the history of postage stamps and stamp collecting, but when he's discussing his personal investment in the hobby, starting in childhood and then picking it up again decades later, it's great stuff. Actually, he does make some of the details compelling, when he's talking about his special subgenre of collecting: stamps with printing errors. And ALL the information is presented in a very reader-friendly way.

But I still would have liked to hear a bit more about the impact of resuming his (very expensive) hobby in midlife on his marriage--he's very strong on the youthful passages, and the family history, but when the story approaches the present day, the personal drama just felt more tantalizing than fulfilled, if that makes sense.
Profile Image for Colleen.
253 reviews2 followers
March 23, 2009
I was excited to read this book, figuring either it would be a great memoir, or a great book about stamps, but this book was neither. Though I did enjoy reading about young Simon's growing love for stamps, I would have like the personal element of the story to be introduced much much earlier. After a promising tidbit about the role of stamps in ending his marriage, Garfield then reverted to long reflections on stamps; his wife and his adult relationships are never even factored into the story.

Perhaps a more knowledgable reader will enjoy the detailed discussions of specific stamps, but for me, the appeal of this book was supposed to be the personal connection, an element I found lacking. Though Garfield is an excellent writer, I just didn't feel a connection to the story or to his obsession with stamps and other collections.
Profile Image for Cynthia.
722 reviews51 followers
February 22, 2013
This book has a great first page but then very quickly devolves into a mess. I loved Garfield's book on fonts, Just My Type, a fantastic brilliantly composed book, very funny and full of life. In this book, Garfield keeps talking about how hard it is for him to convey to other people why he finds stamps so interesting, which maybe should have been a clue to him that he was not the right person to do this book. He takes a potentially really interesting subject and does nothing with it. But he overshares on all the traumas and tragedies and errors of his life (the title is very clever once you read the first page); it meanders and it's kind of pathetic. It makes you feel sorry for his wife, not because he left her and cheated on her but because he's such a mess.
But the first page is really great.
Profile Image for Melissa.
69 reviews
February 21, 2010
In retrospect, this book is as much about collecting, the pursuit of possession, as it is stamps. Even as a collector myself (between the ages of 6-12ish, though my grandmother saved her stamps for me til I was 20), I couldn't get as excited about the specific prints - errors - that S.G. was after. However I can appreciate the pursuit, and the pleasure of mastering or owning something you have practiced or searched for. We were treated to some more of that in the latter chapters, as opposed to in depth focus upon the value of the 1961 2 1/2d stamp missing black, which made up the bulk of the book. But as with all obsessions, only the obsessor really gets it.
Profile Image for Maryellen.
268 reviews
May 26, 2009
Having read the Goldstones narrative on collecting books, I was expecting a similiar tale of the exciting pursuit of postage errors. So I am disappointed that what starts out promising never jells into an exciting story. Instead, Garfield's narrative seems to convey what we nonstamp collecting types suspected all along about stamp collecting. It's boring.
Profile Image for Rozanne.
133 reviews16 followers
January 2, 2010
The book really sort of petered out two-thirds of the way through, but I loved the parts about stamp collecting--esp. his childhood stamp collecting. I was the American female version of the author. We even had many of the same stamps!

There's absolutely no one I can recommend this book to, though, I think it has a very narrow appeal.
Profile Image for Alex Tsiatsos.
Author 1 book
August 6, 2011
I enjoyed this fast little book even though I didn't know or care much about stamps. It was intense in a way not often shared. Even when the author wrote about his regets, I thought I sensed his underlying collector's joy waiting to overcome any shame and consume him.
Profile Image for Mila.
726 reviews32 followers
April 5, 2013
His other book Just My Type A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield was awesome but I found this pretty boring actually, even though I like stamps.
Profile Image for Ipswichblade.
1,141 reviews16 followers
January 7, 2014
Loved this book, it is mainly about stamp collecting which I have to say I have no interest but Simon Garfield makes it fascinating
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.