The Error World (31 page)
Authors: Simon Garfield
* The ten sales were so significant that when they were complete in January 2007, Sotheby's decided to hold another sale entitled 'Missed Opportunities', more than four hundred pages of items that failed to sell first time around. A quarter of the proceeds would go to the London Clinic Liver Centre, as Sir Gawaine's widow, Lady Baillie, had received a liver transplant in 2006.
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* There are many reasons why stamp collecting is not the thing it was for the young, and one of them may be the decline of the traditional family. If parents and grandparents won't enthuse about philately, who will? Schools once did but don't any more. There are no philatelist footballers, few philatelist film stars (and if there are, they won't talk about it. What an image-crusher; Hollywood child-molesters stand more chance of rehabilitation).
A father and grandfather may be keen on stamps, but the children aren't, just as they aren't much interested in carrying on the family business these days. In this way the stamps leave the family, and find their way to dealers and auctions. The case of Sir Maxwell Joseph represented no finer example of this.
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* Quoted in
Owning Art: the Contemporary Art Collector's Handbook,
by Louisa Buck and Judith Greer, Cultureshock Media, 2006.
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* Unless you bought an ugly Estate.
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* He could afford to. Within a few days of selling Brandon my stamps, they were on his website at twice the price. I had expected this. I had once seen him bid at an auction for a unique British error (the 1964 6d Botanical Conference with yellow flowers omitted), landing it for under £20,000. A week later, you could buy it on his website stamperrors.com for £42,500, the exact price I had got from Brandon for my entire collection. A week after that it was still there, but now the cost was 'Price on Request'.
