The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A fascinating, one-of-a-kind journey through the world of stamps and collecting by maverick historian and writer Robert Irwin Why do we collect? Is it to rescue objects from oblivion? Is it a kind of desire - or even a kind of madness? In this mosaic of fiction, philosophy, sociology, biography and autobiography, virtuoso thinker Robert Irwin takes us on a wayward journey through the art of collecting, and his own intellectual passions. Drawing on the works of writers including Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Iris Murdoch and Georges Perec, as well as a host of lesser-known geniuses, flaneurs, obsessives and eccentrics, Irwin explores everything from mysticism to nostalgia, classical antiquity to surrealism, dreams to death. We join Thomas De Quincey on a night mail coach, encounter the man who set out to acquire every stamp ever issued and enter the badlands of fakes and forgeries, all in the company of a uniquely brilliant mind. This is a book of wonders; of labyrinthine digressions, good humour and a delight in small things. It is a meditation on the stuff of life.

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Title PageThe Madman’s Guide to Stamp CollectingAcknowledgementsAvailable and Coming Soon FromCopyright

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The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting

The stamp dealer David Brandon is a recurrent figure in Simon Garfield’s memoir, The Error World. ‘There are lots of books about stamps,’ he said, partly as a warning. ‘And they don’t really sell.’1 This does not worry me as this is not that sort of book, for my book about stamp collecting will be of little or no practical use or interest to stamp collectors. It does not deal with the subject’s practicalities. Instead, the following topics are covered: the Psychology and Psychopathology of Collecting; Seriality; Miniaturisation; Classification; Nostalgia; Anal Retentiveness; Specialisation; Fraudulence; Commemoration; Rarity; Completeness; Sexuality of Collecting; Secrecy and Subversion; Digressiveness; Boyhood; Dutchness; Boredom; Death. This book also gives madmen the opportunity to learn that they are not alone in their madness.

As a schoolboy I used to collect stamps. I specialised in stamps of the German states and Holland. Later, as a postgraduate student, I briefly collected stamps of Hejaz, Pahlavi Iran and Ottoman Turkey in order to get practice at reading Arabic and quasi-Arabic calligraphy. I don’t collect stamps any more. I stopped in the 1970s. Until this book was all but complete I have refrained from looking at the stamp collection that I accumulated so many decades ago. My hope was that in its neglect it would have graduated into serving as a time capsule.10

If I am no longer a stamp collector, why did I write this book? The truth is that its origin was uncanny. One night some forty years ago I dreamt that I arrived early at a party (as I so often do) and there across the room I saw my agent leaning against the mantelpiece and I went over to talk to him. ‘Well, now that your last book has been so successful, we have to think what you should write next,’ he said. ‘Ah, I have it! Stamp collecting!’ About two weeks later I arrived early at a real party and there, at the far side of the room, was my agent. I went over to him and told him my dream. He burst out laughing. Then he suddenly sobered up. ‘Actually that is notsuch a bad idea.’ Ever since then I have set aside a small notebook in which I have written down quotations and references to stamps and stamp collecting in unexpected places—so not in GibbonsStampMonthly, but in Ernst Gombrich’s life of Aby Warburg and in Dennis Wheatley’s TotheDevilaDaughter. Then, when I set to writing this book, further intensive researches introduced me to authors I had previously known little or nothing about, including Samuel Beckett, Ellery Queen, Osip Mandelstam, Louise Erdrich and Ciaran Carson, as well as artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and Donald Evans. For me, just the discovery of the writings of the Belfast poet and fiction writer Ciaran Carson has made this project worthwhile.

As Walter Benjamin wrote in One-Way Street, ‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.’ The Madman’s Guide toStampCollectinglargely consists of quotations and in this respect it resembles Benjamin’s Arcades Projectand Roberto Calasso’s 11TheRuinofKasch(and in Umberto Eco’s TheMysteriousFlameofQueenLoanathere is a character who collects quotations on fog, and his book too will be discussed in what follows). The quotations argue with each other and, in so doing, they do most of my work for me. Since the labyrinthine and digressive nature of my book has been inspired (if that is indeed the right verb) by the writings of Thomas De Quincey, it seems appropriate to open with a quotation from him.

Every moment are shouted aloud by the Post-Office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years,—Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow—expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mailbags. That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play;—horses! can these be horses that (unless powerfully reined in) would bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What stir!—what sea-like ferment!—what a thundering of wheels, what a trampling of horses!—what farewell cheers—what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation.2

Thomas De Quincey’s account of his alleged night journey on a mail coach which sped through the night, carrying news of a 12great British victory at Talavera in 1809 against the French troops which Napoleon had sent into Spain, owed more to opium-fuelled visionary prose, nostalgia and literary self-display than it did to real memories. It is a stylish conjuring trick, writing produced ‘on the brink of abysses’. The horn sounds, flags are flying and the horses, with their fiery eyeballs and dilated nostrils, are like creatures of the Apocalypse. The speed of the horses matches the fever in De Quincey’s blood. Such speed is dangerous, and at times youthful exhilaration gives way to obsessive apprehension of danger and sudden death. ‘Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.’ There is perhaps also a politico-religious subtext to this night journey, and a biographer of De Quincey has written of ‘kaleidoscopic nightmares in which Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo is assimilated within a broader myth of Britain as a righteous colonial power charged by God with the task of preserving and extending Christian civilization’.3

The Post Office had established the mail-coach service in Britain in 1784. The service placed a ferocious emphasis on speed and hence the coaches would travel by night when there was much less traffic on the roads. They stopped only for the exchange of horses (at approximately every ten miles). The coachman would sound his post horn to give advance warning to the keepers of turnpike gates. It was against the law for the keepers or anyone else to get in the way of the speeding coach. The coach also took passengers, and young men like De Quincey paid extra for the excitement of sitting up front beside the coachman. A guard 13with a gun had a seat at the back of the coach. Yet, after all this racing through the countryside, there were frequent final delays in getting the post delivered, since it was not the sender who paid for delivery of the letter, and the recipient might be hard to find or reluctant to pay.

In TheEnglishMail-Coacha haunted man looks back across forty years to the romance of those night-time races to deliver the mail. De Quincey’s sublime masterpiece was first published in Blackwood’sMagazinein 1849. (He would die in 1859.) Yet already by 1849 the spread of a network of railways across Britain from the 1830s onwards and the commencement of the penny post in 1840 had made De Quincey’s high-flown, opium-soaked account of the excitements of these night journeys an evocation of an era that was all but over. The railways and the penny post changed everything and with that change the tranquil pursuit of philately became possible.

Mostly tranquil, anyway. But, as we shall see, the story of stamp collecting embraces murder, theft, strange erotic practices, conspiracy theories and various deep philosophies. This book is itself a collectionof references to collecting and insights about that activity. The rarer and more improbable those references and insights are, the more pleased I am to have stumbled across them. In this literary collection, like so many other kinds of collection, rarity is something to be prized. To take just one example, in the nineteenth century, if a man wanted to check whether he was subject to nocturnal erections, then he might stick a row of perforated stamps round the base of his penis and, if in the 14morning he discovered that the row of stamps had torn at the perforations, then he would know that he had had a nocturnal erection. That is only the first of many useful revelations. (We shall return to the erotic aspects of stamp collecting later.) This anthology is a mosaic of fiction, philosophy, sociology, biography and autobiography. I repeat, I doubt it will be of much interest to real-life stamp collectors.

stamp collecting and its alleged boringness has had a poor press from quite a few writers and thinkers. William Inge (1860–1954), the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and a prolific author and social commentator, was rechristened the ‘gloomy dean’ by the DailyMailbecause of his hostility to the notions of progress and democracy, as well as his general misanthropy—and to all this we may add his contempt for philately. He was once asked, in what was presumably intended to be polite conversation, ‘Are you interested in liturgy?’ To which he replied, ‘No. Neither do I collect postage stamps.’ The Cambridge Regius Professor of History G.N. Clark’s thinking ran along the same lines as Inge’s. The medievalist Maurice Keen recalled an encounter with him. 15‘Long ago I once confessed to the historian G.N. Clark, my uncle by marriage, that I was interested in medieval chivalry. “Does that include heraldry?” he asked. “No,” I said; “Good,” said he; “I have always thought that for a historian heraldry stands about the same level as stamp collecting.”’4 When the physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) declared that ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting’, it seems unlikely that he was being complimentary about the hobby. On the broader topic of hobbies, the writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp (1908–99) stated that ‘Hobbies are instead of life. What is needed is a greater intensity of living style.’ But ‘life’ might be overrated and, against Crisp, I can quote the American essayist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946): ‘People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.’ And there are surely some who prefer stamp collecting to life.

The novelist and essayist George Orwell (1903–1950) had mixed feelings about stamps and stamp collecting. In 1934 he worked in Booklovers’ Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, and he wrote a short article about his time there, ‘Bookshop Memories’ (published in Fortnightlyin 1936). As a sideline to the book business, the shop had sold stamps to collectors. Orwell was obviously unenthusiastic about that clientele: ‘stamp collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums’. And yet stamp collecting was an integral part of the Englishness that Orwell so loved. In his famous essay ‘England Your England’, he commented on an ‘English characteristic which is so much a part 16of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privatenessof English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans.’ So the fish-like stamp collectors were as much part of his beloved country as the famous, though anonymous, ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’. Orwell also conceded the educational value of stamp collecting. In a letter sent to Jack Common in 1939 he wrote that ‘I suppose about 50 per cent of them know whereabouts Czechoslovakia was, but where is the Ukraine? And where are Memel and Eupen Malmedy, not to mention Russian Subcarpathia? The only people who can keep up these days are philatelists.’

Right from the beginning there was an idea that stamps might serve an educational purpose. Before he became an institutional innovator and a knighted public figure, Rowland Hill (1795–1879) had been a teacher. Headmaster of Hazelwood, an experimental school in Birmingham, he had spent twenty-five years as a teacher and educational reformer. He was an idealist who believed that the introduction of cheap postage would encourage working-class literacy. He introduced this strange thing, the postage stamp, in the following words, ‘a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp and covered at the back with a glutinous wash which the bringer might by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter’. Hill’s proposed penny postal service, in which the sender rather than the recipient paid the postage, met with 17opposition from vested interests in Parliament. But during the first year of the Penny Black’s introduction, 1840, the number of letters sent by mail more than doubled. (By the way, the Penny Black is not a rare stamp. How could it be? It was in use throughout Great Britain for decades and 68,808 were issued.) Hill had correctly calculated that a reduction in postal charges would result in an increase of use and therefore of revenue.

Apart from their role in encouraging literacy, there were of course various lessons to be learnt from the imagery carried by stamps—some of those lessons quite subtle. The future Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was born in Alexandria in Egypt, the son of an official in Posts and Telegraphs. Subsequently the English-speaking family moved to Vienna where Hobsbawm went to school. He remembered how as a schoolboy in 1920s Austria he collected stamps:

What children born in 1917 knew of the events of the still young twentieth century which were so alive in the minds of parents and grandparents—war, breakdown, revolution, inflation—was what adults told us or, more likely, what we overheard them talking about. The only direct evidence we had of them were the changing images on postage stamps. Stamp collecting in the 1920s, though it was far from self-explanatory, was a good introduction to the political history of Europe since 1914. For an expatriate British boy it dramatized the contrast between the unchanging continuity of George V’s head on British stamps and the chaos of overprints, new names and new currencies elsewhere.5

18In V.S. Naipaul’s acclaimed novel ABendintheRiverthe bend in question has been successively ‘a forest, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa and now this’. The protagonist, Salim, a Muslim Indian, begins life on the coast of East Africa, but ‘it came to me while I was quite young, still at school, that our way of life was antiquated and almost at an end’.

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.

The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called ‘Arab Dhow’. It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said ‘This is what is most striking about this place.’ Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would certainly remark on, something not quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in their own modern docks.6

And ‘it was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage stamps that gave us our ideas about what was picturesque about ourselves’ (p.268).

Such thoughts led Salim to try look at things from a distance. 19Increasingly his sense that his people had fallen behind heightens his sense of personal insecurity. There is no redemption from the past, only gathering darkness. So he migrates from East Africa to set up a general store in what is evidently the Congo (subsequently renamed Zaire) and Naipaul’s novel becomes a meditation on the dismal ruination of the Congo and the alienation of its inhabitants.

Salim definitely had a point. To take a real-life example, as long as Egypt was a formal British protectorate and, after 1922, an unofficial one until the 1950s, the images on its stamps dwelt overwhelmingly on Egypt’s ancient and picturesque past which was Pharaonic: the Pyramids, a Nile felucca, the Temple of Abu Simbel, the statue of Cleopatra at Dendera—oh, and a little British dam at Aswan. The Islamic history of Egypt—the Arab conquests, the Abbasids, Fatimids, Mamluks and Ottomans—was obliterated in this antiquarian bias. The only significant exceptions were the portraits of the Khedive Fuad I and, after his death in 1922, his successor Farouq. (Incidentally Farouq was a noteworthy collector. He collected Fabergé eggs, aspirins, old coins, razor blades, Geiger counters and stamps. His stamp collection, which was one of the most valuable in the world, was sold by auction two years after he was deposed in 1952.) It was only once the Khedival rule and informal British protectorate came to an end and a Nasserist republic was established in 1953 that one finds stamps featuring images of the Cairo Electronics Exhibition, Egypt’s youth, an agricultural labourer, the defence of Port Said and so forth.20

testimonials to the educational value of stamp collecting are found in unexpected places. In the poet Louis Aragon’s Surrealist novel, LePaysandeParis(1926; TheParisPeasant) I found the following:

O philately, philately: you are a most strange goddess, a slightly foolish fairy, and it is you who take by the hand the child emerging from the enchanted forest in which little Tom Thumb, the Blue Bird, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf have finally gone to sleep side by side; it is you, too, who illustrate Jules Verne and who transport over the oceans on brightly coloured paper wings those hearts least prepared for the voyage. Those who, like me, got their first idea of the Sudan from a small carmine-bordered rectangle in which a white burnous mounted on a mahari advances on a sepia background, those who were familiar with the Emperor of Brazil imprisoned within his oval frame, with the giraffes of Nyasaland and the Australian swans, with Christopher Columbus discovering America in violet, will understand what I mean! But the tiresome reflections which adorn the window display we are in the process of contemplating no longer belong to those multi-valued series we used 21to know. Edward VII looks like a monarch from ancient times. Great adventures have shaken those childhood companions of ours, the stamps which a thousand bonds of mystery unite with world history. Here are the newcomers which take into account a recent and incomprehensible reshuffling of global boundaries. Here are the stamps of defeats, the stamps of revolutions.7

Note Aragon’s nostalgia first for his passage out of infancy, which the dignified imagery of stamps assisted, and then his increasing unease about the evidence of global insecurity that had been signalled by the more recent stamps. It will be necessary to return to LePaysandeParis.

The passage out of infancy must lead with a horrid inevitability to consideration of the topic of Freudianism. In ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908) Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had stressed the significance of early problems in toilet training, specifically regarding defecation, for the development of character later in life. The infant has resented the loss of control over his bowels. Freud described the anal-retentive type of adult as being preoccupied with orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy. Later Freud and his followers would go on to identify a propensity for forming collections as a further characteristic of the anal-retentive type. The collector seeks an object of desire. Surprisingly the crucial prototype object of desire is shit. Freud thought that the collector is a person who, without knowing it, is seeking to recover the faeces lost due to the lack of bowel control in the infant years. It is this unconscious drive that will form the anally retentive 22personality of an adult who will seek to create a collection of something or other that he can control, organise and rearrange. Interestingly Freud himself was famous as a collector, having acquired a collection of some 2,500 antiquities which he kept in his study, with some favoured pieces on his writing desk. In addition to antiquities he also collected Chinese and Greek vases, exemplary psychoanalytic cases, jokes, Jewish anecdotes, dreams and errors. Did Freud diagnose himself as having an anally retentive personality? Marshall, the protagonist of TheStampCollector, the novel by David Benedictus (1938–2023), was not impressed by this sort of thing: ‘Then there was a supercilious article he had once read, not in a stamp magazine, but in a superior Sunday supplement, about collectors. It said that stamp collectors were anally obsessed, repressed homosexuals … (Marshall was not sure what the anus had to do with it.)’8

According to John Forrester, a prolific writer on Freud and Freudianism, ‘Following Susan Stewart’s fine analysis in her book OnLonging(1984), we can see that Freud’s objects (the antiques and texts) served both the functions of evoking the past, of entering into the nostalgic dimension of the souvenir, and of effacing the past, of building a new timeless world of the collection.’ A child’s learning to control, that is to possess the contents of his bowels, gives him or her an early sense of being in control of something. Later in adult life possessiveness always betrayed anxiety. ‘I can’t live without it!’ Freud thought of himself as a conquistador who would explore and conquer the new world of psychoanalysis.9 Since Freud had invented this new world, it 23was perhaps easy for him to conquer it. Other psychoanalytically minded theorists have suggested that the male penchant for collecting might be a substitute for erotic conquests.

Donald Winnicott (1896–1971) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, much of whose research was centred on child analysis. In his findings he placed great stress on transitional objects in childhood, such as teddy bears. Playing with such objects made a sort of path all the way up to such eventual adult pursuits as business and politics. His theory of object relations was set out in a paper entitled ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, which was published in the InternationalJournalofPsychoanalysis, 34 (1953). Winnicott presented the transitional object as something which protected the infant from loneliness. His ideas about transitional objects in infancy were further developed by Werner Muensterberger (1913–2011). Muensterberger was an American citizen of German origin who became a famous psychoanalyst, and who was also well known for his collection of African art. Muensterberger, who acknowledged an intellectual debt to Winnicott, presented collecting as a way, commonly an irrational way, to soothe traumas or anxieties that had their origins in childhood and in particular the separation from one’s mother. (As it happened, Muensterberger’s mother died when he was still a boy, and at around the same time he started collecting African art.) In 1994 he published Collecting:AnUnrulyPassion, an influential and rather repetitive series of essays which took a psychoanalytic approach to the subject.10 Having defined collecting as ‘the selective gathering, and keeping of objects 24of subjective value’, he took an oddly patronising view of the activity. Collectors were portrayed as damaged personalities who have been driven to collect in attempts to repair traumas experienced in early infancy. Collecting ‘echoes emotions that have their roots in old affective experiences of oneness; in early sensations of wish fulfilment, and in relief of the child’s anxiety and frustration that comes with feeling helpless and alone. Objects in the collector’s experience, real or imagined, allow for a magical escape into a remote and private world … Since it represents an experience of triumph in defence against anxiety and the fear of loss, the return must be effected over and again … Not surprisingly, these phenomena have their root in early childhood. They originate in the baby’s experiences not simply with hunger and satiety but with the subjective perception of closeness and belief, or, negatively, doubt in magical control’ (pp.15–16). Again: ‘What is prevalent is a need for reassertion in order to undo an old narcissistic wound. The objects are meant to give a sense of affirmation and magical support’ (p.43). Also: ‘Irrespective of individual idiosyncrasies of collectors, and no matter what or how they collect, one issue is paramount: the objects in their possession are all ultimate, often unconscious assurances against despair and loneliness’ (p.48).

And again: ‘When a better or more desirable object is found in someone else’s possession by a collector, complicated emotions arise—admiration, envy, a notion of anxiety, distress, feelings of inferiority, in extreme cases, rage—no one of which excludes any of the others. There is a logic to such various responses: 25insofar as these objects are magic-laden they imply that the owner is endowed with greater power than you. This leads to a feeling of potential subjugation and subsequently to a need for reaffirmation by the way of symbolic equivalents. And because of their unconscious link with the instinct for self-preservation, such needs must not be frustrated’ (pp.141–2). And one more: ‘“collectibles” are, strictly speaking, implements that are meant to enhance or restore a narcissistically injured person’s self’ (p.235). So it is very clear that we are to understand that collectors of anything are among the world’s walking wounded. They are inadequate, delusional, narcissistic fantasists. At best, Muensterberger’s evidence for this is anecdotal, but mostly his thesis is based on sheer repetitive assertion and a great deal of it reads like autobiographical self-analysis posing as science.

The longest chapter in the book is devoted to Honoré de Balzac’s novel LeCousinPons(1847) and the hypothetical common identity of Balzac and his creation Pons as collectors. Yet it is doubtful whether Balzac was a collector in the same sense that millions of ordinary collectors of, say, postage stamps, or cigarette cards or Ming porcelain are. True, Balzac was an extravagant accumulator of furnishings, paintings, tableware and what-not. So Le Cousin Ponshas been read by Muensterberger as a kind of self-portrait of the author as collector. But was Balzac really a collector? And how much did Pons have in common with Balzac? To return to Muensterberger’s definition of collecting as ‘the selective gathering, and keeping of objects of subjective value’, Balzac did accumulate objects, but not in any selective or 26specialised way. He did not become particularly knowledgeable about what he had acquired, nor did he take care to hang on to what he had purchased. Instead he bought furniture, dishes, plates, hangings and other stuff in order to impress his guests. It was as if he had set out to furnish a series of stage sets in which his literary success could be celebrated and admired. If he ran out of cash, and he often did, then the furnishings and paintings were sold without compunction.

Was Pons a self-portrait of Balzac? First, the story, which is primarily about a contested inheritance rather than collecting, was based on a short story by Albéric Second, a friend of Balzac’s. Secondly, Balzac shows Pons to be a collector with an obsessive passion for visual beauty, and one who was intensely knowledgeable about what he had acquired. He lives for art and eating (and it is true that Pons and Balzac shared a passion for food). As Pons falls mortally ill, philistine parasites plot to loot what he had acquired. LeCousinPonsis one of several Balzac novels that are primarily about contested legacies.

The Italian expert on decadent literature and on interior decoration, Mario Praz (1896–1982), is another of Muensterberger’s case studies (or should that be victims?) in Collecting. TheRomanticAgony, a study of Romantic eroticism and cruel fantasies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, is one of Praz’s best-known books. TheHouseofLifeis quite different. First published in Italian as Lacasadellavitain 1958, it is a coolly erudite tour of a magnificent flat in Rome that he inhabited for several decades.11 He papered and furnished the flat with things he had collected 27from the Empire and Regency periods. As he takes the reader from room to room, Praz shows off their arrangement, discourses on their materials and styles of decoration and reminisces about how he came to acquire some of his treasures. ‘There is a secret magnetic force which attracts things to the man who desires them’ (p.265). It was for him simultaneously a journey into a Napoleonic past and an exploration of his own memories.

He had managed to create a fairy tale in which he could live and in which ‘there is a feeling of tension in the stillness, and sometimes the ear seems to catch the sound of faint stirrings, imperceptibly smothered, muffled, as in Stravinsky’s Firebird. The house is a wood like the wood of the Sleeping Beauty; as in a great room, brightly lit and deserted, whose doors will soon be thrown open for a ball, as in a church, solemn, glowing with light, where soon, to the sound of an organ, a procession will advance from the sacristy, so a sense of expectation, of mingled anxiety and jubilation, quivers in the air of this house which, as all its visitors admit, even if in certain ways it seems like a museum, is yet a living museum, not a lifeless assemblage of objects’ (p.327). And at the end of it all, he confesses that ‘in the course of the years, I see myself as having myself become an object and an image, a museum piece among museum pieces, already detached and remote, and … I have looked at myself in a convex mirror, and I have seen myself no bigger than a handful of dust’ (p.550).

Muensterberger, who met Praz sometime in the 1960s, found him to be ‘a small, unimpressive man’ who had written that his 28interests tended to turn into manias. As Praz put it: ‘the mania for Empire furniture, the mania for books of emblems, the mania for Russian, just as, when a child, I had the mania for dolls and statuettes of saints and, as a boy, a mania for stamps’ (pp.25–6). The boyhood passion for stamps is confirmed in TheHouseofLifewhen he looked back on an occasion when he wanted to go to a particular library in Rome: ‘not for books but for stamps, for they sold collectors’ stamps there also and on the previous evening I had been eyeing a series of showy stamps, from Borneo possibly, which I was longing to secure for myself now that my mother had given me the money to buy them’ (p.189). But we learn no more about the stamps, since he goes on to give an account of how the visit to the library was unwillingly forestalled by an outing to a place called Antella which was his first proper introduction to Italian rural life. Still it seems safe to guess that the boyhood mania for collecting stamps served as an apprenticeship for the grown man’s collection of furniture, waxes, busts, prints, paintings, embroidery and other relics of a past century.

According to Muensterberger, ‘Praz spoke of the beginnings of his collection but persistently stressed the considerable links with his unhappy personal life’, which included a short-lived marriage. Muensterberger judged that Praz’s passion for accumulated objects betokened ‘an almost erotic excitement’. A club foot contributed to his loneliness and sense of inadequacy, particularly during the years of the First World War. In the long run his collecting Empire furniture and decorative objects ‘had become a primary means for sublimating if not healing the 29trauma of his physical infirmity and an over-compensation for seeing himself as an outcast’.12 A sad man indeed if we must take Muensterberger’s word for all this. Yet if Collectinghad been written with a fraction of the eloquence, erudition, self-awareness and fond evocations of earlier years that distinguishes the masterpiece that is TheHouseofLife, then one might more easily be persuaded by Muensterberger’s contentions. As for the man he sought to patronise, the distinguished American literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in ‘The Genie of the Via Giulia’ that Praz ‘will come to be known to posterity—so far as a foreigner can judge—as one of the best Italian writers of his time’.

Muensterberger was not a hard-line Freudian and he wrote that ‘I am not in accord with certain psychoanalytic propositions according to which “cupidity and collecting mania … have their correlating determinants in the infantile attitude toward feces.” This, I believe, is too confining a point of view. It is a homogenization on the basis of appearances and genetic phases instead of seeing the phenomenon in its immediate experiential context’ (p.229). Here he was specifically criticising a proposition by Otto Fenichel in The Psychoanalytic Theory ofNeurosis,13 Yet Muensterberger was still possessed by the notion that collecting was necessarily the sign of an inward lack or deformity.

The Russian-born writer Ayn Rand (1905–82), author of the right-wing libertarian novels TheFountainhead (1943) and AtlasShrugged(1957), presented, what seems to me, a positive and much more convincing portrait of collecting based on her own experience of this activity. This took the form of a short article, 30‘Why I Like Stamp Collecting’, which was published in MinkusStampJournalin 1971. As a girl in Russia, Rand had collected stamps between the ages of ten and twelve before giving it up, but more than fifty years later she returned to the hobby:

Only now the feeling had the eagerness of childhood combined with the full awareness, freedom and confidence of age … The pleasure lies in a certain way of using one’s mind. Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people … because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.14

She argued that creating a stamp collection involved decisions, choices and advances towards a goal and this made it a long-range activity. Of course collecting met the hard-working person’s need for a change of track in order to relax, but essentially stamp collecting involved the same mental activity as planning and making a career. But, unlike the career, problem solving was not involved. The stamp collector entered a ‘brotherhood’ of the like-minded. ‘It is a world for orderly, rational minds.’ She asked herself, why specifically stamps? She answered: ‘Because stamps are the concrete, visible symbols of an enormous abstraction: of the communications net embracing the world.’ The postal system was a great global achievement (as John Updike similarly had argued, and we will get to him). Rand is perhaps one example among many of an adult who resumes stamp collecting and, in doing so, seeks to return to his or her childhood but with adult 31powers. Towards the end of her article Rand commended Iceland, Japan and Ryukyu as leaders in beautiful designs.

to return briefly to Freud, as his collection of figurines suggests, he was fascinated by antiquity. He believed that psychoanalysis was a form of archaeology. His final publication, MosesandMonotheism(1939), was an exercise in ancient history in which he sought to prove that Moses, the founder of monotheism, was actually an Egyptian. Many have regarded this exercise as an ingenious fantasy. The German cultural historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) had no time for Freud and took quite a different view of antiquity. He belonged to a wealthy banking family and consequently was able to pursue a career as a private scholar in Hamburg and to build up a considerable personal library. (He collected stamps as well as books and photographs.) His younger brother took over the bank in exchange for funding Aby’s book purchases. That was a substantial financial commitment, for by 1911 the older brother had acquired a private library of nearly 15,000 books.15 The famous art historian Kenneth Clark described the life-changing impact on him by his attendance at a lecture given by Warburg in Rome in 1927:32

Warburg was without doubt the most original thinker on art history of our time, and entirely changed the course of art-historical studies. His point of view could be described as a reaction against the formalistic or stylistic approach of Morelli or Berenson. But I am sure that this was not his intention, because from the first his mind moved in an entirely different way. Instead of thinking of works of art as life-enhancing representations he thought of them as symbols, and he believed that the art historian should concern himself with the origin, meaning and transmission of symbolic images. The Renaissance was his chosen field, partly because Renaissance art contained a large number of such images … Symbols are a dangerous branch of study as they easily lead to magic; and magic leads to loss of reason.16

(Warburg had suffered a mental breakdown in 1918. In 1920 he had had to be hospitalised and it took him years to recover.)

One of the strange tasks Aby Warburg had set himself was to trace the afterlife of ancient Greek and Roman iconography in, among other things, the postage stamps of his own time. He specialised in the Nachleben, the afterlife of classical Antiquity and the survival of its imagery into modern times. This kind of iconographic activity amounted to a Romantic resurrection which Warburg described as ‘ghost stories for adults’. Renaissance painters and subsequently Rembrandt and others had studied the ancient sarcophagi and triumphal arches and learned from the gestures of the carved figures on them how passion and movement should be depicted. Gestures encoded ideas. Warburg 33particularly interested himself in the Pathosformel