The first time he saw Botticelli at the Uffizi, it was the half-shell that made him salivate. He’d always had strange loves: tidal pools, hermit crabs from the midway, oversized stamp albums. He skipped keggers to enumerate the nautilus’s chambers, measure regeneration in severed starfish limbs. His decade of Baltic postage book swelled in damp sea air as he lugged it to the shore. In a villa soaked in Tyrian purple, the postage on a letter from home: a giant squid embracing a sunk schooner in a tangle of tentacles, the cancellation obscuring one inky eye: he had discovered philatelic…