Archivists of the obvious

There are two kinds of collecting: the selective and the accumulative. In the first, the collector seeks to assemble only the best examples of a class of object (paintings, sculptures, porcelain). The collection improves as its quality, but not its quantity, increases. With this method, sacrifices may continually be made, as objects of lesser worth are sold to acquire more desirable items. The number of entries in the inventory may remain static over the years, but the collection is seen to advance through substitution, or through a process of "trading up".

...In the second, accumulative type of collection, the significance of the individual object is seen to grow through its keeping company with such a large number of items of a similar kind: one Gabon stamp may be neither here nor there, but 50 Gabon stamps act as a spur to the acquisition of 50 more. And as the ceiling is reached, as all the Gabon stamps seem to have been tracked down, a kind of restlessness sets in - Cameroon suddenly becomes interesting and desirable from the collector's point of view. Soon it is no longer a matter of forming a collection. Multiple classes of object have begun to occupy the collector's attention...

To such pioneers, such archivists of the obvious, there is nothing that cannot be collected. The trick is to think of the category . . . and then to persist. Two such collectors, in an article I read not long ago, were driving on their way to make a purchase when one stopped the car and approached a hitch-hiker, offering him $25 for his cardboard sign. On the spur of the moment, he had conceived the plan to make a collection of hitch-hikers' cardboard signs.

The example illustrates the paradigm. The individual object is of no great worth on its own. It is only through accumulation, only by becoming one of a category, that it has any great chance of engaging our interest. And this particular case seems particularly unpromising. But one has to remember that all such ephemera, by definition, must once have seemed unpromising. The "Wanted" poster from the Wild West, which today would be such a find, or the printed advertisement for the slave auction, were once trash.

...So much that we admire today has passed through that period of disregard, that dangerous prelude to value...

From James Fenton's excellent New Statesman review (subscription required) of We Are The People: postcards from the collection of Tom Phillips.

(Do you still have those bus-transfers, Cory?)