Collecting

An Evolutionary Glitch

Collecting seems like a glitch in human evolution. It makes sense that we evolved to desire physical objects. Early on, accumulating a few useful tools or personal adornments probably yielded a leg up in the reproductive competition. Back in the hunter-gatherer and early farming days, being programmed to squirrel away extra nuts and seeds was advantageous.

But once you go beyond amassing the necessary, collections are counterproductive. Resources are spent accumulating objects that offer no survival benefit. Even after you have wasted the time, money, and energy acquiring objects, they distract you from more productive endeavors and clutter your home, whether your home is a cave, a childhood bedroom, or a house.

Many reasons have been proposed for why we collect. Mostly, the reasons sound like collectors’ attempts to convince their parents, their partners, or themselves that they are not insane. Let’s call these the six rationalizations.

1. Pleasure

   Collections bring joy to the collector who appreciates the aesthetics of the collected.

2. The Thrill of the Hunt

   Collectors often celebrate the thrill of the hunt and the dopamine hit when an object is found. Of course, little is written about the subsequent remorse. The emptiness usually drives the collector to restart the process, hunting for a variation of the last find.

3. Nostalgia

   Nostalgia affects collectors in two ways. For old collections, nostalgia might encourage people to hold on to their goodies. Older collectors might be driven by nostalgia to collect objects that remind them of their youth. It is well known that objects’ values often peak 40 or so years after their release. This is when the fifty-something, now flush with cash and a midlife crisis, begins collecting the things he became smitten with at thirteen.

4. Education

   The collector acquires knowledge during his quest. I’m kind of good with knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but what he learns is usually useless minutiae.

5. Community

   Collectors often connect with a like-minded community. In today’s world of bowling alone, it's hard to be skeptical about anything that brings people together. I do wonder if the collector’s communities are mostly groups of people fetishizing useless objects to avoid meaningful conversation.¹ I am sure there are baseball card collectors, poor and newly single, who occupy their time discussing the condition of a 1969 Topps Tom Seaver card.

6. Preservation

   A benefit of collecting referenced on The Antiques Roadshow is that it helps preserve objects. Museums care for an impossibly small number of pieces while families and the collecting community maintain the rest.

I am writing about this because I am a serial collector. The glitch exists in my genome. I can track the genetics back to my father and maternal grandmother.² My affliction is, fortunately, relatively benign; it has not yet led to the loss of a home, a family, or a career. It has undoubtedly led me to bore some friends, but it has also brought me some joy, knowledge, and middle-aged quirkiness.

I’ll skip my first collections: match books, bottle caps, coins, stamps, and the labels from bottles of mineral water. They were boring, the collections that you’d expect of a little boy. Let’s just say that they unmasked the pathology (and I still have a half dozen rolls of wheatback pennies.

Wacky Packages were trading cards that parodied consumer products; they were also my first collection associated with any of the six rationalizations. I loved them, and I still regret giving them to a younger kid who lived in my building. I gave them away when I felt like they were too childish for me.

I kind of yearn for them. It is strange to think of the nostalgic power of a collection I no longer have, but this is the truth of Wacky Packages. Just thinking about them gives me some strange longing for my 1970s childhood. The art was amazing, done by some famous cartoonists, and so “of the time” (catachronistic?). The products spoofed were American classics. My mother worked in advertising -- a copywriter and creative director -- and I remember her getting a kick out of the most intelligent ones. (They were not all good; some seemed made to appeal to the 10-year-old boys. My nostalgia for Whacky Packages is so strong that a few years ago, I actually bought a couple of hardcover books that reproduced the cards. (Give me credit for not spending the time, money, and energy to repurchase the collection.)

If you’ve read anything else on this site, you know this was coming. I collected baseball cards from 1972-1980, and I can tick off most of the rationalizations for what I got out of the collection.

Baseball cards certainly gave me pleasure. I remember the excitement of tearing open a pack, rifling through the cards, and chewing that pink piece of cardboard masquerading as gum. I thrilled at the hunt, always hoping to find one of my favorite players. If Springsteen sang, “I learned more from a three-minute record than I ever learned in school”, I can say this for baseball cards. Before the internet, and even before my aunt and uncle bought me The Baseball Encyclopedia, the back of cards was where you accessed player stats. I pored over those.

Although playing baseball and rooting for baseball brought me my childhood community, the cards were less a part of that. I am not sure my collection is doing much for preservation. I can’t imagine there is that great a market for 1970s cards in mediocre condition, but they are still safely boxed up in our basement.

Lastly nostalgia. Like Whacky Packages, nostalgia didn't play a role in my collecting, but it's part of why I keep my cards, even though I don’t need them for this memory. At some point on a Saturday, my father would ask me if I wanted to go with him to The International Haystack. We’d race the 10 miles or so to the store, he tended to drive fast. He would buy a couple of cartons of cigarettes – enough to get him through the week -- and I would get a pack or two of cards.

After baseball cards came, predictably, records. (This post is making me feel so damn ordinary.) Instead of tearing open packs of cards in the back of our Beetle, I would tear open the cellophane packaging of an album on the six train. In the time it took to go from 59^th Street to 33^rd, I’d have devoured the liner notes. Records provided pleasure, education, and community in spades. Preservation? Not so much. I abandoned 4/5 of my collection in 2015. Not being an audiophile and maybe possessing only one copy of the collector’s gene, I made the rational decision that I did not need to lug five wine boxes of records along with me for life.

A quick segue into a collection of pure nostalgia. Growing up, there were always a few Florentine leather boxes around the house. They contained collar stays, safety pins, buttons and whatever else needed keeping. I even had a few of my own – usually passed down after they’d been partially destroyed. As an adult, I bought one or two on trips, mainly to give Sarah and I something to hunt for.

Cleaning out my parents’ apartment, I found a stash of these. This collection activated the gene, and one unfortunate day, I realized that they were pretty easy to come by on eBay. What followed was six months of cobbling together a collection that now contains family heirlooms and more recent purchases. Most are empty, but some contain collar stays, spring bars, baby teeth, and pacifiers.

Spring bars, you ask? I’ve been a watch wearer since high school. At the time, I sported a pretty cool, 4-button digital Casio. I would buy a new watch every few years. These watches were fine, always quartz, always inexpensive, and I never gave them too much thought. I was wearing a Timex Iron Man on December 3, 2015, when I stumbled on this article in the New York Times. There was something about the article and the timing that got me interested. I asked Sarah for a Seiko SKX007 for Christmas – they were selling for about $175. She bought it for me – I think we’d both say that was a mistake – and I tumbled into a rabbit hole.

Really, though, it hasn’t been that bad. They can be relatively inexpensive (though they can also be exorbitantly expensive). They don’t take up much room. They are easy to resell. As Sarah once said, when asked if this collection annoys her, “It could be worse. It could be cars, or younger women.”

I take pleasure in the objects, their mechanisms, aesthetics, and stories. I’ve been occasionally thrilled by the hunt or the bidding, and I’ve experienced my share of buyer's remorse. I’ve learned a ton, though the knowledge is utterly useless and toxically dull to most of my friends. I have found a remarkable community, some online and some actual humans.

I’ve done OK in the world of collecting. I have little remorse; I’ve made it through my journey relatively unscathed. There is one clue that I might be an unreliable narrator here. I asked my daughter to guess which collections I’d written about. Among her guesses were t-shirts from Instagram, baseball caps, and matchbox cars. I might be worse off than I care to admit.

1. I have to credit one of my favorite internet lists of all time for the wording here.

2. A cousin of mine might have an even worse version of this malady, but he’s been able to parlay it into a career.