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 ref rained f rom looking at the stamp collection that I accumulated so many decades ago. My hope was that in its neglect it would have grad- uated into serving as a time capsule. 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 not such 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 Gibbons Stamp Monthly , but in Ernst Gombrich''s life of Aby Warburg and in Dennis Wheatley''s To the Devil a Daughter . 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 to Stamp Collecting largely consists of quotations and in this respect it resembles Benjamin''s Arcades Project and Roberto Calasso''s The Ruin of Kasch (and in Umberto Eco''s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana there 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 antiq- uity 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 pow- erfully reined in) would bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thun- dering of wheels, what a trampling of horses!--what farewell cheers--what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation. Thomas De Quincey''s account of his alleged night journey on a mail coach which sped through the night, carrying news of a great 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 ''kalei- doscopic 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''.

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 with 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 The English Mail-Coach a 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''s Magazine in 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 collection of 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 morning 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.