The collector

When I was young I had a collection of miniature dictionaries - Russian to English, Spanish to English and all the rest.  They were only a couple of inches in height, and bound in brightly-coloured plastic.  I could speak practically none of the languages, and I had no conceivable use for the dictionaries.  I simply collected them, and aspired to a complete set.  Later on, my collecting became more purposeful.  At the time when I listened to a great deal of classical music on records, I would always go for big boxed sets which offered me the complete X of Y.  Thus one week I would get to know the complete piano music of Ravel, or the complete motets of Gibbons, or the complete string quartets of Shostakovitch.  It was the same with books; the complete corpus of Anglo-Saxon, the complete poems of Robert Browning.  I was a compulsive collector.

I have more or less kicked the habit now, I can pass record and book shops without succumbing to any violent urge to go and fill some lacuna in my many collections.  I recognise what my collecting meant, and what it means for the millions of cigar label, pigeon egg and football scarf collectors up and down the country.  Collecting is about control; it is about order; it is about fear.

Collectors recognise that the world out there is very big - too big for comfort, and much too big ever to be comprehended.  They sense that its chaos threatens them; they crave an order which that world will never supply.  So they create their own, smaller world, and within it they impose their own order.

This is why collectors are at once so disparate and so similar.  What is collected is almost irrelevant.  Ironically, the one thing they seem fanatical about is in fact quite unimportant.  It is the medium, not an end in itself.  Hence, too, the extraordinary range of collecting fads.  From lamp posts to false teeth; from tins of shoe polish to train numbers.

While it is probably true that what we are drawn to collect reflects some deep psychological need within us - stamps for the would-be traveller, coins for the would-be millionaire - and that they provide a socially acceptable outlet for our deepest longings, other factors play a part.  For instance specialisation in collecting - not just cheese labels, but South American cheese labels - helps set the collector apart.  It asserts individuality.  The fractured world of collecting mirrors and sometimes replaces the desire for identity in the real world.

Just as collecting allows a small corner of reality to be controlled, so the choice of specialism allows the collector not only mastery but a sense of prestige.  You, too, can be the acknowledged world expert on bus tickets issued in the Manchester area between 1947 and 1983.  The fact that you are the only person in the world who cares a hoot about this field is irrelevant; the unalterable fact remains that you have validated your own sense of value.  In the last analysis, there is no difference between obsessive collecting and all intellectual endeavour.  The ultimate aim of both is control of a circumscribed domain, and the final reward power through knowledge.  It is simply a question of scale.

(22.11.86)

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