Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, an Oxford book collector was angrily asked why he was not at the front, fighting for civilisation. ‘I am civilisation!’ he replied. I hope the anecdote is true because I believe that collecting is one of civilisation’s essential features. Whether hoarding for the afterlife in ancient Egypt or amassing chronicles of human experience for the Library of Alexandria, whether cataloguing words in Dr Johnson’s England or accumulating footgear in Imelda Marcos’s Philippines, collectors define what they or their society deem to be civilised. 

In this posthumously published book, Robert Irwin turns his inquisitive eye on the collecting passion, specifically on the passion of collecting stamps. Philately is, like so many other whimsical passions, in decline. But there are brave crusaders for it, such as the Guinness World Record holder Dr Jawahar Israni from Delhi, who by 2020 had collected over fifty thousand stamps from 237 countries. These days, when the postal service has become a species on the verge of extinction, and Denmark’s state-run PostNord is planning to end all letter deliveries (citing a 90 per cent decline in letter volumes since the start of the century), Irwin’s book can be read as an elegy. Not that The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting offers any method. On the very first page, Irwin tells the reader that the book will give no practical advice to philatelists. It will, however, cover the following topics:

the Psychology and Psychopathology of Collecting; Seriality; Miniaturisation; Classification; Nostalgia; Anal Retentiveness; Specialisation; Fraudulence; Commemoration; Rarity; Completeness; Sexuality of Collecting; Secrecy and Subversion; Digressiveness; Boyhood; Dutchness; Boredom; Death. This book also gives madmen the opportunity to learn that they are not alone in their madness. 

Irwin tells us that the