The Madman's Guide to Stamp Collecting

Why do we collect? Is it to rescue objects from oblivion? Is it a kind of desire—or even a kind of madness? Robert Irwin—novelist, historian, translator, collector—was a true original; a virtuoso thinker who combined encyclopaedic knowledge with boundless curiosity.

In this ‘mosaic of fiction, philosophy, sociology, biography and autobiography’ he takes us on a wayward journey through the art of collecting, and his own intellectual passions. Drawing on a treasure-trove of literary references from writers including Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Iris Murdoch and Georges Perec, as well as a host of lesser-known geniuses, flaneurs, obsessives and eccentrics, Irwin explores everything from mysticism to nostalgia, psychology to propaganda, classical antiquity to surrealism, dreams to death.

We join Thomas De Quincey on a night mail coach, encounter the man who set out to acquire every stamp ever issued, enter the shadowlands of long-vanished kingdoms and the badlands of fakes and forgeries, all in the company of a uniquely brilliant mind.