Wendel Swan has told me that he is sometimes reluctant to post for fear of repeating himself.

Those of you who read my thoughts here know that I have no shame in this area. In fact, I do believe that the occasional rehearsal of something said before may be the occasion for spotting new facets in it. Of course, I have now reached an age when arguments like that are increasingly convenient.

But to this particular rehearsal.

One of the things that makes the task that we have set for ourselves in this salon difficult, is the interior character of the collecting urge and the fact that collectors seem often not really in control of, and in fact often surprised by, the character of the collecting urges they experience and the directions in which these urges take them.

The best literary portrayal of this that I know, is a book I have recommended before by Evan Connell, Jr. and entitled "The Connoisseur." (It's out of print but you can find the cheap paper back if you look on the used book boards.)

Mr. Connell is clearly a collector himself and I think he has us "cold" with regard to our basic tendencies.

His hero is not only set upon by a collecting urge without warning, he finds very quickly that it has importantly taken over his life. Connell leads us a tour of most of the standard figures that collectors encounter. The university authority, the literature, the auction scene, good and bad dealers and other collectors, some of whom the hero finds beyond belief. At the end of the story, the hero is in a phone booth, a little drunk, bargaining over the next piece.

All this because he, a NYC business man, waiting for a plane, walked into a touristy shop in Albuquerque, and bought, on pure impulse, a small statue that appealed to him. The story is told largely in soliloquy, with the hero continually surprised at the existence of his collecting urge, the unpredictable character of its development and how little control he has over it all.

If this is anything like the modal collecting experience, we have a large reason why we can't predict what collectors are likely to do one hundred years hence. It's often difficult for collectors themselves to predict what they are going to collect next week.

Regards,

R. John Howe

The dynamics of collecting are surely quantitative. Regardless of what you collect, you pretty much have to go about it the same way. Find/encounter/be given/buy/steal/make something that strikes your fancy and proceed to accumulate more of them. Some things are relatively easy. Coins, stamps, baseball cards. Each of these has many inexpensive items and many VERY expensive items. The relative value is subjective (determined by the views of the collectors), and objective (determined by supply and demand). The biggest unknown is what thing it is that one collects, or more properly, what thing it is that one considers a collection.
I have a collection of rugs. I also have a collection of jazz CD's. But I don't consider the CD's a "collection" in the same way. I don't think of myself as a jazz CD collector. I am a rug collector with a lot of jazz CD's.
You may have a rug collection and are a rug collector, but also have a collection of crystal wine glasses. You probably don't think of yourself as a wine glass collector. Similarly, a person with a collection of 19th century impressionist paintings may very well have a considerably more valuable collection of rugs than you, me or Wendel, yet not consider himself a rug collector (well, maybe not Wendel )

Collectively yours,

Patrick Weiler

A little more about the "out of control" aspect of collecting.

I think it is a feature of many hobbies, more generally.

When I last came out of graduate school and a brief stint of university teaching, I had been exposed to and caught up in the field of moral philosophy in a quite serious way. Similarly, I had been caught (after Kent State and also very much to my surprise) in some rather conventional aspects of student strikes and protest concerning the Vietnam war.

So as I came back into the work world, I was "knife-edge" sensitized to a large number of moral issues and saw that they had implications, if one took them seriously, for how one lived one's life.

About this time my wife began to own and to exhibit collies dogs seriously (if you call 12 adults and three litters, her acme, serious, and I do). There are lots of features of the dog world that resemble the world of rug collecting.

I found (again very much to my surprise) that I was, despite its obviously trivial social character (I used to say to my wife about some of the conformation issues that dog exhibitors took seriously, "Some of these things would have to be raised several levels in quality to reach that of 'bad art.'") that I was VERY interested in some aspects of the dog world.

I became, almost without realizing it, a minor authority on American collie blood lines and breeding strategies. And I found myself applying my professional skills to try to identify and then learn the skills that dog judges employ (for example, dog skeletal structure and how that affects the way a dog moves).

Now all of this is far from rugs but it follows, I think, one of the dynamics of rug collecting that have caught my eye and which will be a real factor in what rug collectors collect in 2101.

Surprises like those I experienced in the dog world, despite the fact that I could see from the beginning that it was likely a species of human activity without "proper" social purpose and disconnected entirely from the pursuit of important issues of human morality.

I was a little embarrassed to find myself so interested in something obviously so trivial.

So sometimes with rugs too.

Regards,

R. John Howe

This impulse to collect may seem trivial, or the things we collect may seem inconsequential, but there is most likely a "survival of the species" aspect to it that is not obvious. We collect, categorize, compare, maintain, share and learn about the things we collect. This impulse probably also led to behaviors that allowed us to be a succesful species. Compare it with the acts of gathering food, making medicines, building shelters, making weapons; many things which required the same types of behavior. We just are not applying this behavior to a species-saving, humanity enriching process. (well, maybe we are!)

Patrick Weiler

Good thought. I need an occasional external and comforting justification for this particular neurosis of mine.

Regards,

R. John Howe