The Philatelist

Tito Perdue’s The Philatelist is a novella about the joys of stamp collecting as a refuge from an unhappy life. The Philatelist is paired with the short story “Good Things in Tiny Places,” read on the occasion of the author receiving the 2015 H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature. “It happens more than just sometimes that overly refined persons like thee and me may opt to turn away from ordinary things and seek entry into a more perfect world than this one. I’m thinking about art galleries, concert halls, coin and stamp collections, ingenious mechanical devices or a well-played chess match. People like you spend too much time gazing at the stars while others, like my good friend who offers us a case study of the type, has traded away his life in a still-continuing struggle to assemble a non-representative array of the world’s most beautiful postage stamps. A little custodial ‘art gallery,’ he calls it, his own bespoken domain after three failed marriages and a deleterious son. All the elements, I’ve been told, can be found in a single drop of sea water. So, too, with a choice collection of the world’s postage brought together for aesthetic purposes. Thus my friend.  One doesn’t need to be a good person, remember, to be extraordinarily interesting anyway.”—From the author   Tito Perdue is the author of sixteen other novels, including Lee (1991), The New Austerities (1994), Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013) Reuben (2014), the William’s House quartet (2016), Cynosura (2017), Philip (2017), The Bent Pyramid (2018), and Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Shall Come (2018). In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.