Brian J. Birch by Abhishek Bhuwalka

The Bibliophile of Standish and Montignac Toupinerie: Brian J. Birch By Abhishek Bhuwalka Figure 1: Brian Birch today the world of philatelic literature, Brian Birch (Figure 1) stands tall. Following in the footsteps of renowned bibliophiles and recorders of the past like P. J. Anderson, B. In T. K. Smith, E. D. Bacon, Fred. J. Melville, the Williams brothers, and the Negus brothers, today Birch is one of the extremely few exclusive proponents of philatelic bibliography and history. Birch’s prodigious output over the last three decades consists of tens of thousands of pages. The vast scope of his Philatelic Bibliophile’s Companion needs to be seen to be believed; I keep discovering new aspects every so often. I first read of Birch in the book Milestones of the Philatelic Literature of the 19th Century (Note 1). Later I began corresponding with him but have not had the fortune to meet him. I was looking forward to it at Stockholmia 2019, but Birch could not attend due to illness. I can think of no better person to inaugurate this new series on philatelic bibliophiles of the world. Birch has much wisdom to share and hence my introduction must be necessarily short. © Abhishek Bhuwalka Page 1 of 16 Brian, tell us about yourself. I was born Brian John Birch on January 18, 1949, at Liverpool. My father was Frederick Birch, a policeman in the Liverpool Force, and my mother was Edna May Birch, a hairdresser and later shopkeeper. I had an older brother, David Frederick Birch, born in 1946, who also became a policeman (Figure 2). I met my Figure 2: Birch with brother David (right). Photo taken in 1953 to celebrate future wife, Marion Eslick, at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. university. We have two children, Sally and Geoffrey. Following schooling, I attended the Department of Metallurgy at the University of Liverpool in 1967, graduating three years later. Following two years of research, I received my Master of Engineering degree. I moved to the University of Aston in Birmingham as a Technical Information Officer at the newly-opened Wolfson Heat Treatment Centre and spent the next two years there. I eventually left to join a small private company, Nemo Heat Treatments Ltd. In 1983, Nemo was taken over by the industry leader, Blandburgh, part of Bodycote International plc, a large multinational conglomerate. I spent the remainder of my career with Bodycote managing various plants and ended my time there as Director of Health, Safety and Environmental Compliance in 2009 after 31 years of service. How did you get into the hobby? When I was nine, my father gave my brother and I a stamp album each and a set of stamps. I still remember my set – East German cancelled-to-order flowers issued in 1957. We collected in tandem for many years, trying hard not to compete and in the end, he kept only France and Germany and the other countries became mine. I was always the more interested in philately whilst he basically stopped collecting when he joined the police force and, a few years later, got married. At the age of 11, after primary school, I moved to Alsop Grammar School in the Aintree district of Liverpool. After a couple of years, I was introduced to the school’s stamp club, which was run by the Head of the Spanish Department. During my years at the University (Figure 3), I kept my collection up but obviously at a lower level of intensity. Eventually, family life and increased commitments at work led to the stamps being laid aside for extended periods of time. Inevitably, during these low periods, I even neglected new issues and this led to my loss of interest in a collection getting ever further from completion. You must be one of the few philatelists in the world interested only in the research and collection of philatelic literature and not in philately or postal history. How did you settle on your present interests? © Abhishek Bhuwalka Page 2 of 16 As part of my training at Wolfson, I was sent to the British Library depot at Boston Spa, Lincolnshire, on a course of information science in 1973. Here I was seriously introduced to literature in all of its forms and was inspired to look more towards the literature than the stamps. The transition was fairly easy. As a collector of the whole of the Commonwealth, I could not aspire to anything like a complete collection on my salary and I enjoyed stamps so generally that I could never decide to specialise in any particular countries. So, my interest in collecting stamps began to subside and was eventually abandoned as my interest in the literature increased. Your love of philatelic literature research started at the Perfin Society. How? Figure 3: Birch with his Master of Engineering degree In 1971, I joined the then-named Security Endorsement and Perfin Society (SEPS) of Great Britain. A couple of years later a new librarian was required. This was an excellent opportunity so soon after my training at the British Library. Naturally, I began to expand the library with both articles from philatelic magazines and books and pamphlets. The library had been accompanied by a Library List and I considered making a new one. However, the difficulty was that the library was increasing in size so rapidly that it would be very quickly out of date. Also, in a specialised library the depth of indexing would have to be such that even small pieces of important information could be retrieved. At work, in those pre-personal computer days, I was taking relevant literature, producing an abstract and indexing it using punch-cards. Not wishing to set up too elaborate a system, I created Perfins Abstracts. For each item in the library, I assigned it a number, created an abstract of its contents, and indexed it using 3 x 5 inch cards. Occasionally, I had an index to the cards typed up by my sister-in-law so that I could distribute an alphabetical index to each of the members. This innovation led the notable British bibliophile James Negus to join the Society and gave rise to a lifelong friendship. Although I gave the library up decades ago (in 1984) and no longer collect perfins, I have retained my membership of the renamed Perfin Society and am still the largest contributor to the library, sending the Society every relevant article I come across. How did you start collecting philatelic literature? With no collection to support, the standard monographs and handbooks held little interest for me and I chose to specialise in philatelic bibliography and the history of philately, its literature and its adherents. Even then I realised that collectors were often more interesting © Abhishek Bhuwalka Page 3 of 16 Figure 4: Birch’s long-form works occupying about 75 cm of shelf space than their collections. I had no knowledge of the Earl of Crawford at that time, so my idea was to collect every piece of philatelic literature I came across. Harry Hayes’ literature auctions (Note 2) soon disabused me of that idea. Your magnum opus is The Philatelic Bibliophile’s Companion and a couple of other long- term projects (Figure 4; also see Appendix). How did you start that? The subject area I had chosen to specialise in was too vast to cover in a single list so that some simple classification was required. I looked at the typical general libraries’ classifications but these were far too general for me. Specialised philatelic “Subject heading” type listings produced by specialised philatelic libraries such as the APRL and Cardinal Spellman Libraries concentrated on countries and other general terms of use to stamp collectors. I needed something specific to bibliophiles. It was not until a decade or so later that I was forced to properly restructure my researches. Early in 1987 I received a package from Roger Skinner of Friends of the Western Philatelic Library (Figure 5). The package contained a substantial philatelic bibliography of bibliographic works arranged in five sections (I actually received only three). While corresponding with him, I realised that ultimate product would be a reference manual intended for the use of both bibliophiles and librarians. That’s how the idea of The Philatelic Bibliophile’s Companion was conceived – essentially as a Bibliography of Bibliographies, arranged according to subject. © Abhishek Bhuwalka Page 4 of 16 Over the years, I revised the “Contents” list (Figure 5) extensively as I acquired additional items for my library and tried to fit them into my scheme. As recently as 2015, I added a further new section which came to my attention as I tried to fit Almanacs unsuccessfully into one of the existing categories. Why are your major projects only available as a soft copy? Although I spent a great deal of time in compiling some of these over the past 40 or so years, it was evident that their scope is such that they would never be finished and so could never be conventionally published as a hard copy. The Bibliophile was first uploaded on your own website and is now on the Global Philatelic Library’s site. How and why did it make this transition? Each of my never-ending projects has required thousands of hours of my time to bring them to their current, very unfinished state. I hate the thought that if anything happened to me, this work could all be lost to posterity. In the late 1990s, the answer was obvious – I had my own website, created by a colleague at work, www.philatelicliterature.org, and loaded all of my long-term projects onto it.

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