Does anyone NOT collect?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collecting, autobiographies

The tendency to collect is a characteristic of the animal brain. For most vertebrates, at least, collecting is a life-and-death matter. I am not talking about food here, but of nesting materials: fish, birds, and mice, for example, either build nests of collected materials or line a suitable cavity with stones, leaves, hair, or something to make it more congenial. With collecting roots reaching into our evolutionary past at least 400 million years, it seems fitting that "person who collects" is a redundancy. To collect is to live. But each of us has a different focus (or many foci), and different levels of selectivity.

Just getting down to humans, now, we find some houses cluttered with things, accumulations that never get thinned out, while some are so spare that one might think, "Surely here lives someone who does not collect." Do a little digging, a little prying. An empty house does not bespeak an empty mind, but perhaps one whose internal collections suffice, and external things matter not at all. Certain experienced toastmasters collect jokes; some employ written collections, while others keep them all inside. Many, many people collect relationships, and name-drop relentlessly so that you never forget it.

But most of us, a little or a lot, have our collections of knick-knacks, statuettes, stamps, insects, shells, coins, rocks, jewelry, clocks, chairs, or cookie fortunes. Those with the money collect paintings, statuary, jewelry, even whole rooms (I think of the DuPont Winterthur mansion, a huge "house" that consists of a collection of over 100 whole rooms obtained from mansions all over Europe, disassembled, shipped, and reassembled).

Consider a category of thing, and someone, somewhere, has a collection of them: lead tire weights, lead or tin soldiers, juice bottles, soup cans or labels, cereal boxes, woven wicker chair seats…in a world of billions of collectors, any category of things will have numerous devotees.

Some people have sufficiently narrow focus, and sufficient discipline, to collect, say, only Japanese match box labels, such as these shown here. In such a narrow category, one may have some hope of a comprehensive collection. But of match box labels in general, that hope is rather remote. Just the labels from "match box cars", which came in a match box-sized box that never held matches, number in the thousands.

My wife is one that seems to have little interest in collecting, but she has a box of old photos that is as precious to her as the Queen's jewels. Photography itself is a kind of collecting. These days when a modest-sized hard disk can hold all the pictures of a lifetime, I suspect more digital photographs are taken each year than all the film snapshots ever taken. While I make about as many prints for my photo albums as ever, I take ten or more digital pix for every one I print.

Some things we collect on purpose, and we frequently purchase them. Other collections come to us gratis, as a bonus, like these fruit labels. This random image from the Web connects me to its creator, for I collect these labels also, though mine are not as nicely arranged. At various times, I've also collected stamps, coins, fossils, minerals, jar-grown crystals that look like minerals, insects (particularly butterflies), old clocks, and wallpaper images for my "photo show" screensaver.

Only one of my collected objects has been found to have value: at a "swap" meeting at the local stamp club, I brought in my European duplicate stamps. One fellow went through an envelope of German stamps in some detail, then came to me with one: "This one is worth eight dollars. What will you sell it for?" Since I'd got it for free, and had my own copy, we settled on a price well below eight dollars. It was a bit hard to do, though I'd come with the intention of selling unneeded copies for a nickel each. Though I did both buying and selling that evening, I could never be a dealer! Dealers don't collect, and vice versa. My collections are of little or no worth, then, but of great sentimental value to me.

Thus I have a certain kinship with Professor William Davies King, who has written Collections of Nothing. In this autobiography, King details a life of collecting things for which he expended mainly effort. Some tidbits are seen in this photo. The cover art on the book is from his collection of the linings of "safety" envelopes. He has about 800 varieties. This fact points up that humans are also inveterate creators. ONE kind of envelope liner would do, for all practical purposes.

Much of the bulk of the author's collections consists of the labels or cartons from decades of food items. While his initial impulse was to chronicle what he and his family consumed, he soon found himself buying all sorts of off-brands, for a broader scope. But as a collector of things that "ride along" with the main item purchased, and have no value in themselves, he truly is a collector of Nothing, or of Things worth Nothing. In that, he writes, "A collector of collectors would find me rare."

But collecting has two meanings; one is about gathering, the other about curation. Properly speaking, the things we gather are simply an accumulation until they are sorted, perhaps labeled, and ordered into some sort of structure. That is where the work is. When you have a few tons of small paper thingies, that amounts to a great deal of sorting. King asks us at one point to mourn the time lost to caring for his collections. I don't see why. What else might he have done with his time? Yes, he has two youngish children, but the greatest loss was not to his collections, it was to his divorce.

At times, we find out more than we bargained for. Stream of consciousness riffs often led to details I found embarrassing. And it must be just hell to get him to finish a goodbye. His sixth chapter, intended to be the last, is a long discursion on finishing the writing. Then he adds a quite appropriately short seventh chapter to actually close the book. Whew!