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Authors: Simon Garfield
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bundles organised alphabetically, and some of the bundles were distinctly dusty. Elsewhere there were tall piles of discarded albums and paper sheets containing the unwanted duplicates from the many collections he had purchased to plunder a few rare specimens. Behind Mahe's desk stood a board with banknotes nailed to it in various denominations: 50,000 francs was allocated each week for the purchase of new stamps. At one stage in the 1890s, Ferrary's relatives became so alarmed at the amount he was spending on stamps that they decided to use the French courts to slow him down. His relatives claimed he had gone insane; to prove otherwise, Ferrary enrolled in a law course at the University of Brussels, obtaining his degree after five years. He also gave his 'solemn word' that 'in no case and under no pretext whatever I would make a debit and never purchase anything for which I could not pay cash'.
According to a book by Gustav Schenk, * the Count never found peace during his work on the ultimate collection; he must have realised that he could never get it all, and he didn't know enough about his quarry to value them beyond their monetary value. Accordingly, he was preyed on by scam artists who prepared fakes specifically for his visit. These stamps, unique in themselves, are now known as Ferrarities. But there is some evidence he knew what he was doing. He once spent a large amount with a dealer in Berlin, and on his return to Paris he was informed that almost all of his purchases were duds. 'Do you think I had not seen that?' Ferrary is reported as asking. 'The man wanted money badly, and had nothing else, so I had to take the forgeries.' On one occasion he bought an item from the known forgers Benjamin and Sarpy as it was being prepared in the back room.
Ferrary's zeal and compassion hinted at a singular ambition: immortality. 'The philatelic memorial to which I have devoted my entire life', he wrote in his will, 'I bequeath with pride and joy to my beloved German fatherland.' He was writing in the middle of the First World War; he died in 1917. He had once hoped to leave his GB and Colonies stamps to the British Museum, where they would have sat alongside Tapling's, but the war changed his plans. His stamps, which he wished to be known as the Arnold Collection, were seized by the French as war reparations, and auctioned at various sales between 1921 and 1923. The sales provoked feverish bidding, and many items reached record prices. Bidders came from all over the world, attracted not only by the rare lots, but also by the stories attached to them. The total value of the sale was £402,965.
Throughout my new stamp frenzy, it seemed that every publication I picked up had stamps in it. Count Ferrary would have been pleased with
The Plot against America,
the 2004 novel by Philip Roth, and certainly he would have loved its jacket. This displayed a one-cent stamp with a pleasant green image of Yosemite in California, or it would have been pleasant had it not been overprinted with a heavy black swastika. The novel imagines a scenario in which the isolationist Jew-baiting Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Another nightmare occurs early in the book, when the young male narrator has a dream that his prized set of 1934 National Parks stamps have all been vandalised with the swastika. Earlier in the dream, the portrait of George Washington on a set of stamps had been replaced with that of Adolf Hitler. Stamps are everything for this seven year old; inspired by the widely publicised collecting passions of Roosevelt, he carries his stamp album with him everywhere, much as other children his age carried teddy bears. I had no trouble imagining myself in his shoes.
A short while after reading this I picked up a copy of
The New Yorker,
and there was a short story by Louise Erdrich called 'Disaster Stamps of Pluto'. Pluto is not the planet (as was), but a backward town in North Dakota. The
According to a book by Gustav Schenk, * the Count never found peace during his work on the ultimate collection; he must have realised that he could never get it all, and he didn't know enough about his quarry to value them beyond their monetary value. Accordingly, he was preyed on by scam artists who prepared fakes specifically for his visit. These stamps, unique in themselves, are now known as Ferrarities. But there is some evidence he knew what he was doing. He once spent a large amount with a dealer in Berlin, and on his return to Paris he was informed that almost all of his purchases were duds. 'Do you think I had not seen that?' Ferrary is reported as asking. 'The man wanted money badly, and had nothing else, so I had to take the forgeries.' On one occasion he bought an item from the known forgers Benjamin and Sarpy as it was being prepared in the back room.
Ferrary's zeal and compassion hinted at a singular ambition: immortality. 'The philatelic memorial to which I have devoted my entire life', he wrote in his will, 'I bequeath with pride and joy to my beloved German fatherland.' He was writing in the middle of the First World War; he died in 1917. He had once hoped to leave his GB and Colonies stamps to the British Museum, where they would have sat alongside Tapling's, but the war changed his plans. His stamps, which he wished to be known as the Arnold Collection, were seized by the French as war reparations, and auctioned at various sales between 1921 and 1923. The sales provoked feverish bidding, and many items reached record prices. Bidders came from all over the world, attracted not only by the rare lots, but also by the stories attached to them. The total value of the sale was £402,965.
Throughout my new stamp frenzy, it seemed that every publication I picked up had stamps in it. Count Ferrary would have been pleased with
The Plot against America,
the 2004 novel by Philip Roth, and certainly he would have loved its jacket. This displayed a one-cent stamp with a pleasant green image of Yosemite in California, or it would have been pleasant had it not been overprinted with a heavy black swastika. The novel imagines a scenario in which the isolationist Jew-baiting Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Another nightmare occurs early in the book, when the young male narrator has a dream that his prized set of 1934 National Parks stamps have all been vandalised with the swastika. Earlier in the dream, the portrait of George Washington on a set of stamps had been replaced with that of Adolf Hitler. Stamps are everything for this seven year old; inspired by the widely publicised collecting passions of Roosevelt, he carries his stamp album with him everywhere, much as other children his age carried teddy bears. I had no trouble imagining myself in his shoes.
A short while after reading this I picked up a copy of
The New Yorker,
and there was a short story by Louise Erdrich called 'Disaster Stamps of Pluto'. Pluto is not the planet (as was), but a backward town in North Dakota. The
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