The Buildings Series

“The marvelous, no matter what kind, is always beautiful.”
André Breton

The ways in which people search for the marvelous are themselves marvelous, and not only in art, where Schwitters or Cornell or Ernst have created a new poetry . . . and not only in poetry, for which Lautréamont delivered his formula for the marvelous: “the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.”¹³

I knew a man whose passion was not influenced by an umbrella or by an adjoining sewing machine, but who, on his small operating table, worked over hundreds of thousands of 2 × 3 cm pieces of colored paper with a magnifying glass, scissors, and pincers. His concern was to discover in them irregularities or even errors. He collected these errors.

Richard R. collected stamps—not stamps from all over the world; only those that were issued by the German post office for a short period during the 1940s. These stamps showed German buildings, like the Holsten Gate in Lübeck, the Frauenkirche in Munich, and so forth. Since it was not so easy, just after the war, to print stamps in the ruins of towns that had been almost totally destroyed, not all the printings were faultless. The thought of getting his hands on these imperfect printings made this specialist’s mouth water. And he was not the only one. The means of acquisition, like journeys to the moon, were managed, planned, and calculated using scientific methods, by a society involving stamp lovers from São Paulo to New York, from South Africa to Berlin.

Such an international “collection of errors” required an international organization. This need was answered by a special Journal of Errors, produced so that everyone should know where an error had been detected, and what sort of error. On Cologne Cathedral, top right-hand corner, a fraction of a millimeter, a window appears lit up when it should be dark. Or on the Holsten Gate, bottom left-hand corner, can that be a dog; what’s a dog doing here? These were delicacies for stamp gourmets, and they had to be fished out with magnifying glass and loving care, from kilo packages sold annually by the post office, each containing forty to fifty thousand printed stamps.

When perforations went not exactly around the edge in the normal way, but slightly across the picture, then photographs of such marvels were sent to the aforementioned journal’s editorial office, so that collectors in São Paulo, Pretoria, or Düsseldorf might see this discovery truthfully, enlarged.

Thus there came into being a sort of “horizontal” culture, an international Club of Marvels, whose members were associated by bonds of error as families are by bonds of blood. The error of one would be the luck of another.

The idea of error increased as international interest grew. The marvelousness or madness set more and more strenuous tasks. It was not only a question of identifying single jewels of error, but also of discovering the exact position in the original stamp sheet, in which this ruby, sapphire, or diamond of an error might have stood at the moment of its creation. It was Richard R.’s desire to reconstruct such a sheet, by means of international exchanges and sales between New York, his home, and the Philippines, Essen, Santiago de Cuba, South Africa.

To this end he devoted years of travel, letter writing, and meetings. Nobody was allowed to know how many units were still missing from his monumental building-sheet, or how many he had already stored in little paper bags, for other persons had similar passions. Finally, in 1968 there was an international congress in Brunswick, Georgia—a union of the Friends of Error. From all parts of the globe they came, ambassadors of the buildings series, meeting not only to do business, but also for reasons of emotional attachment to error: a festival and a confirmation of their existence.

Older, Richard R. gave up his business work—which he was now only doing on the side in any case—in order to devote twenty-four hours a day to his passion. Meanwhile the treasures collected by these international explorers had assumed cash value—the invalidated scraps of paper became invaluable, like gold, marketed through a stock exchange consisting of telegrams, telephone calls, letters, and meetings. Nothing could be more regular in its workings than this brotherhood, which, by love, awoke to life in the present what had once been invalidated. Artists of a non-art, connoisseurs of folly: they had all detected an undiscovered source from which human beings could extract the little bit of good luck and happiness that fate allowed them.

In 1971 the Pilgrims of the Magnifying Glass met in Toronto for an exhibition of the best and rarest and purest results of their research, with prizes being awarded. The gratification of bringing home to New York the silver medal crowned Richard R.’s almost twenty years of minutely ingenious investigations. Others may carry on with it. Richard R. died. To him, pioneer in this passionate game of chance and calculation on life’s operating table, to him whose wicked extravagances wrung love out of nothingness, the brotherhood devoted a special issue of the Journal of Errors.