Stamp Scams

by Walter Benjamin
translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
I want to speak about a domain which the most learned and cleverest experts in philately have yet to exhaust: the subject of fraud. Fraud involving stamps. Ever since 1840, when Rowland Hill, a simple schoolmaster, was knighted, granted a stipend of some 400,000 marks, and appointed Postmaster General by the British Government in recognition of his invention of the stamp, millions upon millions have been made thanks to that little scrap of paper. Many have made a fortune out of stamps. You all know, thanks to your catalogue, your Senf, Michel or Kohl, how valuable a stamp can become in the right circumstances. The most expensive of all, contrary to popular belief, is not the two-penny Mauritius ‘Post Office’, but the one-penny British Guyana ‘magenta’, a temporary issue of 1856, of which only a single specimen is said to survive. It was incised on a typographic press from the same crude plate which the local newspaper used for announcements by the shipping companies. The sole known specimen was discovered years ago by a young Guyanan collector among old family papers. It then showed up in the La Renotière collection in Paris, the largest stamp collection in the world. No one knows how much its owner paid for the stamp; its catalogue price today has reached a hundred thousand marks. But in 1913 the La Renotière collection already included more than 120,000 stamps and was estimated to be worth more than ten million. Only a millionaire, to be sure, could amuse himself by building such a collection. Whether he anticipated it or not, his collection earned him millions more. Its origin goes back to 1878. As for the beginnings of stamp-collecting itself, they go back a good fifteen years earlier. It was easier to collect in those days than it is today. There were not only fewer stamps, making it easier to have a complete collection: above all, there were as yet no counterfeits or at least no counterfeits intended to deceive collectors. If you happen to subscribe to a stamp-collecting journal, you will know that they talk about counterfeits that have just been issued as though they were a matter of course. How could it be otherwise? There is so much money to be made out of stamps and they comprise so vast a domain that no one can claim complete familiarity with it. Some 64,268 different values were listed in 1914, and that was before the innumerable war and occupation issues appeared.

Jeffrey Mehlman writes: Between 1929 and 1933, partly in order to make ends meet, Walter Benjamin wrote and broadcast a series of radio talks for children. Given the legendary intractability of his best-known work, the circumstance seems as implausible as an anthology of fairy tales by Hegel, or a child’s garden of deconstruction by Derrida. Yet the scripts exist. Some thirty of them, focusing principally on subjects involving fraud and catastrophe, languished for fifteen years in Russia, then Potsdam, before finally getting into print in Germany, in 1985, as Aufklärung für kinder.

‘Stamp Scams’ (Briefmarkenschwindel) is best seen in the context of Benjamin’s lifelong fascination with prodigies of concision in writing. Here, it is as if he had all but succeeded in writing his classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, on the back of a postage-stamp. Just as in the essay the reproducibility of photography seems to be invading the work of visual art, stripping it of its ‘aura’, so here the postmark seems well on its way to supplanting the postage stamp. The result reads like a primer on deconstruction, a discussion concerned less with fraud than with the ambiguous status of postmarks in what Benjamin takes to be the twilight of philately: validating supplement, or index of forgery?

Richard II

According to sources of the time, Richard II was born without skin

At The University of Muri

Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age!
Set your foreheads against the Ignorant hirelings!
For we have hirelings in The Camp, the Court and in the University:
Who would, if they could, forever depress
Mental and prolong Corporeal War

- William Blake

At The University of Muri

One of Walter Benjamin’s most famous writings is ‘Unpacking my library’, a homage to book collecting. Benjamin was also a great user of Libraries, famous for spending most of his days in Paris in the Bibliotheca National. Indeed, the famous unfinished manuscript of the Arcades Project was entrusted to the Librarian there; the famous writer and pervert, George Bataille. What few people know is that years before Benjamin had been a librarian himself, in the University of Muri, back in Germany. He was 26 when he began work there.

Today we find him meeting his friend Professor Scholem in the University refectory. They are drinking tea and talking:-

Walter: “So you know how friendly I am, well, she was clearly lost and looked so alone and like she was having a hard time adjusting to being here...

Gershom: “Where was she from again?”

Walter: “Heilongjiang. It’s in the far north of China. She’s here on some kind of government exchange. Minder follows her everywhere. Anyway, so I was showing her around, and explaining things to her. Asking her how she likes Muri, and Germany. Well, you know how Chinese are, they play their cards close to their chests, and she clearly didn’t want to give too much away. ‘Who’s this strange man asking so many questions?’ So, she’s telling me about a problem with the hot water in her halls and I ask her which halls she’s in. I can tell she’s a little surprised that I asked her outright, and I feel I’ve sort of alarmed her; crossed a line, like she thinks I might stalk her or something; I wouldn’t of course, that stalkers club I used to belong to hasn’t met for months now. Anyway, she tells me which halls she lives in but you can tell she doesn’t want to. I change the conversation and we talk about other things but she’s a little on edge now. So, we talk for a while and she sits down and listens to the radio for a while. Eventually she gets up and is leaving. ‘See you later’ I say, and she shoots me back a look of shear horror. ‘I’m going to see him later? Why am I seeing him later? He knows where I live, is he going to come over? Have I somehow agreed to meet him, and not realised?’ She doesn’t reply, just hurries out the door, almost running.”

Gershom: “Ha, she feels sexually harassed by you.”

Walter: “Exactly, I’m really worried; I think she might make a complaint. Professor Schict will roast me. Imagine if I get accused of sexual harassment. I’ve got to walk past those halls every night too, on my way home. What If she happens to look out her window one night and sees me walking past, she’ll be terrified.

Gershom: “Ah, I wouldn’t worry too much about Schict, that guys got more sexual harassment accusations against him than anyone. 6 the last time I heard. 6 from university staff, it’s a good job he doesn’t go near the students too often, there’d be hell on. As well as the harassment charges I heard he’s also had flings with other married staff members, what’s her name? Err, xxxx.”

Walter: “Blimey, I didn’t know”

Gershom: Ah, senior management, they’re all at it, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that goes on. I heard this one story about XXX, well, you know that big lady in ops, and well I heard she moonlights as a SandM Madame. They all know about it. So, XXX arranged with her to have a meeting about some mundane work stuff, but he wanted, for the entire duration of the meeting, to have his cock out. I don’t think he particularly wanted to be touching it or anything, it was just hanging out as they talked about student admissions procedures or whatever.”

Walter: “Wow, and this really happened? My God.”

Gershom: “I heard they set it up, after that I don’t know what happened.”

Walter: “Wow, incredible. OK, well yes, I don’t feel half so worried now. Hell, maybe I’ll even try it on the next time she comes in. Why not eh?”

Been caught stealing. Part 1

Living in Oxford, I passed my days stealing stuff, wandering the streets and watching the students perform Shakespeare in the open air. It was 1991 and I was hard up, in love with an Irish girl and trying to write an undergrad dissertation about the Marquis De Sade ( I got a 2/2; too many fart jokes inserted at the last minute to try to spice it up).

I’d worked out a great scam which involved me stealing from bookshops and returning stuff elsewhere; Oxford has a lot of bookshops. As long as I kept on rotating who I stole from and who I returned too I would avoid suspicion and keep the show on the road. So for months I was stealing hardbacks from Dillons and taking them back to Waterstones, and sure, from time to time I’d pick something up for myself (I still have all those WSB editions).

This particular story has got to come a few months later and I stole a nice, newly published Martin Amis hardback novel; 'Times Arrow' (time going backward and a dog), from Dillons. I took it into Blackwells to get my refund; “My girlfriend bought this for me and I already got it”. “Ah, well It hasn’t been published yet, er, are you sure she bought it here? I think they have advanced copies in Dillons, maybe she bought it there”. “Oh, yeah maybe, sorry.”

Well, hell, I was already in the shop so I figured I’d have a look around see if there was anything good to steal. I got over to the poetry section where I’d had my eye on some oversized ee cummings books. There was no one else around, this was a great opportunity, an opportunity I’d been looking for, for quite a while; I’d been after these ee cummings editions for a long time. I picked them up, slipped them under my coat and I was off. Great.

So as I walk out the shop I feel the dreaded hand on my shoulder, “Sir, I think you’d better come back into the shop, you can’t walk out the shop with a book like that.” “Ah, yes, er, sorry, yes.” “You’d better come along with me to the manager’s office.” “Yes, right.”
To be continued…….

Lovely Cartoon of Benjamin i found on the web

Saltaire - again

We have talked about Saltaire, in nearby Bradford before. There Titus Salt ran his model village of Saltaire on the ludicrously low profit margin of 4%, and gave away a quarter of a million pounds to charity, often anonymously.

Ruskin Jigsaws, Now available

Walter Benjamin T-shirts, now available

Buying Books

"I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!" -WB

Stealing Books. Part 1

For some, collecting takes on a consuming importance, one that renders the pastime less a hobby than an organizing principle. The collection becomes not just an extension of one’s self, but in some sense a replacement of it. The critic Walter Benjamin, writing of his own beloved collection, of books, observed within certain collectors a tendency to substitute control over their collections for control over disorders prevalent in their own lives. “You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire books became criminals,” Benjamin wrote. “These are the very areas in which any order is nothing more than a hovering above the abyss.”

The University of Salford

As part of the possible refurbishment of the resources
area i make an appointment to visit Salford
university's resources room which is "all singing, all
dancing" (technical speak for modern).
I take a day off work and agree to be there sometime
in the afternoon before 4pm, which is when they close.
Anyway i kind of goof around in the morning and finally set off at about
12.30 thinking i've got plenty of time.
Halfway across the M62 a lorry gets blown over (it was the windiest day
of the year) and is straddling all three lanes of the motorway so i'm
pretty much stationary for the best part of two hours. I finally arrive
in Salford at about 3.30. Now, maybe i should have just turned around
and come back another day but i just kind of wanted to get it done. By
the time i got to Salford i felt like i'd come so far that there was no
way i was gonna give up now.
Anyway after 10 minutes or so i found the university and i'd rung the
lady i was supposed to meet and told her that i would be there for
sure.
So, the resources centre is on the 9th floor of a building called The
Maxwell building. I park my car and ask the Car Park attendent where
the Maxwell building is?
Attendant: "Are you here for your Graduation?"
Me: "Er, no, i'm just supposed to meet someone in the Maxwell building
before four"
Attendant: (He looks at his watch) "well, you'll be lucky, the Maxwell
building is that one over there" (and he points to a huge building far
off in the distance)
So i'm already pretty stressed out because i'm so late and now it
really looks like i'm not gonna make it, but, you know, by now i've got
that determined thing going on so off i run across the campus like some
crazed running suited man.
I get to the Maxwell building, sweaty and dishevelled, and its already
3.50. I seem to be at the rear of the building and cannot find a door.
I run along one side of the building and amazingly there are no doors
whatsoever. I'm frantic by this time, i cannot believe i've come so
far; I'm actually outside the building, but i cannot get in.
I run along the other side of the building and about half way along
finally find an entrance. It says on it 'Maxwell Building: Great Hall'.
Now you must remember that all of this is happening very fast as i'm
despirate to make that 4 oclock deadline. I think to myself "Maxwell
Building Great Hall, well at least im in the maxwell building, all i've
got to do now is look around for stairs". The door opens into a little
hallway with a cupboard at one end and large double doors at the other.
I open the double doors and step in.........
To find myself at the rear of the stage in the main hall in the middle
of the graduation ceremony.
The hall is packed full of Graduands
All of whom are looking at the strange sweaty, flustered man who has
appeared on the stage.
I'm actually on the bloody stage in the middle of a graduation ceremony.
Just infront of me is the chancellor or whoever, who is delivering a
speech to the packed hall. To the left of me along the back of the stage
are various bigwigs in their graduation finery. Everyone is looking at
me in shock and amazement.
I stand there, for what could only really be seconds. Finally i exclaim
"Whoaw" and run right back out through the doors i came in through.
I hightail it right out of there as fast as i can.