NEW BOOK: MADMAN'S GUIDE TO COLLECTING

Gerry writes:

Postage stamps used to come apart with a string of muted pops, their perforations separating serially like tiny zippers. Today's self-adhesive stamps offer scallop-cut edges in lame imitation but must be peeled rather than pulled. And so the old feeling is gone, another species of tactile pleasure made extinct by technological improvement.

If you care about this sort of thing (and why wouldn't you?), you will almost certainly enjoy Robert Irwin's delightful "The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting." Even if you don't, you might, as this hodgepodge of anecdotes, trivia and theories is less about stamps in particular and more about the compulsion to collect in all its facets. Among other topics, Irwin covers "Classification; Nostalgia; Anal Retentiveness; . . . Completeness; Sexuality of Collecting; Secrecy and Subversion; Digressiveness; Boyhood; Dutchness; Boredom; Death."

The book starts with a quick tour of psychoanalytic notions about the urge to collect. Sigmund Freud, to put it crudely, suggested that collecting was a pursuit of control intended to make up for an infantile lack of bowel control. "Other psychoanalytically minded theorists," Irwin writes, "have suggested that the male penchant for collecting might be a substitute for erotic conquests." Still others have argued that collectors are "damaged personalities who have been driven to collect in attempts to repair traumas experienced in early infancy." Collecting, one wrote, is a "magical escape into a remote and private world."

Irwin calls this view "oddly patronizing." But while "traumas" does seem extreme, it's striking how many of the accounts he has gathered seem like a wounded soul's quest for escape. For the historian Peter Gay, born in Berlin in 1923, stamp collecting was an "invisible barrier that cut him off from the Nazi-dominated city," Irwin writes; Gay called the hobby an "island of order." Stamps have similarly been a medium for the building of fanciful alternate worlds. Starting in boyhood, an American designer and artist named Donald Evans created thousands of fictitious stamps from nonexistent countries, using a typewriter to punch out the perforations. For the state of Mangiare ("to eat" in Italian), Evans made a set of 25 stamps of fruits and vegetables. At one point, Irwin notes, Mangiare was occupied by Antipasti.

By the end, the hyperbolic term "madman" seems like an understatement for Irwin's subjects, many of whom are, at a minimum, fantasists. Abdurrahman Bruce Alfonso de Bourbon Condé, born Bruce Chalmers in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., imagined himself the descendant of French royalty and talked himself into a job as head of the Yemeni philatelic office in the 1950s, having been a boyhood pen pal of King Muhammad al-Badr. (Their correspondence started with a request for stamps.) After an antiroyal uprising, Condé ended up in exile, where he supported himself by writing for stamp magazines.

Gerry can't help but add:

Publisher ? : ? Pushkin Press
Publication date ? : ? June 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
Language ? : ? English
Print length ? : ? 240 pages
ISBN-10 ? : ? 1805337769
ISBN-13 ? : ? 978-1805337768
Item Weight ? : ? 13 ounces
Dimensions ? : ? 5.1 x 0.72 x 7.77 inches

To read the complete article, see:
‘The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting' Review: Sticking to What They Know (https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-madmans-guide-to-stamp-collecting-review-sticking-to-what-they-know-e96da0e9)

For more information, or to order, see:
The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting (https://www.amazon.com/Madmans-Guide-Stamp-Collecting/dp/1805337769/ref=sr_1_1)
The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-madmans-guide-to-stamp-collecting-robert-irwin/1147967505)

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