Flaws

My dad was an avid stamp collector. He had a whole cabinet full of albums and would spend his Sunday afternoons working on his collection. From time to time he would buy bulk lots of common, threepenny stamps, the postage at the time. Amongst these lots, there would always be stamps of higher denominations that had probably been used on parcels. It was always exciting for me as a child, hunting through these large boxes of stamps, searching for the more valuable ones. After we’d picked these out, my dad would throw the remaining stamps into a baby bath-tub filled with cold water. After several hours of soaking, the stamps would separate from the paper they had been stuck to. Sometimes this separation needed a little help and we would place our hands into the now-gluey water and rub the stamp in the opposite direction to the paper, thus removing it. The task was then to take the stamps out of the water and lay them out on chicken netting to dry, while the paper was thrown away. We would do the same with the other stamps.

Once dry, my father would flatten the stamps and then search each one with a magnifying glass, looking for flaws. Now this process my have happened ahead of the soaking, while the stamps were still attached to the paper. I can’t remember, but what matters is the time spent on this job. There would have been hundreds of stamps in those lots and the process of searching each one, took my father hours. It would have been a tedious job. These stamps had originally cost 3d to buy but once used were worth virtually nothing. A flaw however, could add hundreds of dollars (or pounds as it was in those days) to the stamp’s value. I am sure my father would have recouped the monetary value of the bulk stamps he bought, but I am not sure he would have recouped the time value. But that didn’t matter, it was his hobby and he enjoyed it.

My purpose for bringing this up today, is the connection to my own book. Despite checking, rechecking and triple checking, there are still errors in this first print run. I have corrected them for the Kindle and Amazon print on demand versions and any future hard copies. However, these first books contain these ‘flaws’. Like the stamps, they are not major; a quotation mark missing, a gap, something that should be in italics rather than plain print. I am sure many readers will miss them, however, I can’t unsee them, now I know they are there, even though they managed to hide themselves during the checking process.

I was disappointed to see them, but the memory of my father’s stamps came up; just how much value these mistakes added to the stamps. Perhaps one day, these first-run copies will also hold value.

Yeh, I know, dream on, but the dreaming does help ease the disappointment.