A paradoxical box of Pandoras

People and their collecting habits are a fascinating window to the human psyche, a real paradoxical box of Pandoras. On the one hand, there are people who collect to highlight their individuality. On the other, serious collectors can exhibit almost fanatical camaraderie with those who also appreciate what they treasure. A collector can be a fastidious record keeper, who thrives on the finer art of cataloguing and maintaining collections, or simply a gatherer, tumbleweeding things that appeal to them.

Then there are those with quiet obsessions, the ones you discover when you visit their house to find a common theme throughout – say, a frog doormat, frog chinaware, frog ornaments, and so on. And, no matter how obscure the collectable item, anyone with the passion, time, and the Internet can become a master of their arena, a sage, a king even.

The act of collecting has to be the greatest human pastime there is. It doesn’t discriminate by age, gender, ethnicity or religion. Language barriers can often be overcome, and money isn’t always an obstacle – think sea shell or bottle cap collections. Thanks to the Internet and global shipping, even geography is less of an obstacle to collecting than in years gone by. In fact, the biggest challenge to the most popular and lasting of human pastimes, serious or casual, is where to draw the line at what they do and don’t want to collect.

Why is collecting so popular? Simple. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, it’s real. Online activities like Second Life and MySpace that compete for potential collectors’ time are quirky and novel, but the element of reality to them is questionable at best.

Collectables, however, are indisputably real. Think of an MP3 file. It’s a frigid block of cold, hard bits of data. It usually comes with no artwork. Easily copied or reproduced. Now think of a vinyl record, with warmth and history, complete with dog-eared sleeve, pops, hiss, and the previous owner’s name scrawled across the label. You can listen to ‘Standing at the crossroads’ by Elmore James on an iPod, true, but it doesn’t really have a sense of nostalgia or a story attached to it. Actually holding the ‘Blues after hours’ LP in your hands, being able to see the cover, and smell it… that’s real.

Collecting used to be about stamps, coins, and music, give or take a teapot or two. No longer. When mass-production and consumerism soared post-fifties and especially through the eighties, the collecting landscape changed too. Many items produced as promotional gimmicks were not expected nor designed to be kept for any serious length of time. However, the opposite has happened. Some have survived to tell the tale, and now the attics are being cleared and the dust blown off the boxes. They’re getting, tongue in cheek, a ‘Second Life’.

Early toys from MacDonalds restaurants, for example, have become highly collectable. Iconic toys from the 70s and 80s are making a comeback as entertainment themes are re-visited and livened up by Hollywood and its entourage. Think Transformers, still riding their wave of popularity after last year’s movie. Think Smurfs, due for a trilogy of movies to celebrate their 50th anniversary this year. Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Fantastic Four have all had make-overs and the original material – toys, posters, comics – are now more sought after than ever. Old is back, it’s collectable, and it’s big.

The baby-boomers are now seeking out these items, with the Internet in one pocket and disposable income in the other. Some become addicted and strive to get ‘everything in the set’, others seek out one or two particular items, often things from earlier memories. Maybe it’s the first record you ever owned, or the dashboard ornament in your first car, and so on. Toys in particular will always be hugely popular among collectors, for these are the very first possessions we come across as human beings, and the memories attached to them stay with us for the rest of our lives.

There is serious money in some of the newer forms of collecting. A Strawberry Shortcake ‘Peach Blush’ set recently sold for $2000, and rare Transformer toys and PEZ containers regularly exceed $1000 at auction. Not bad for plastic robots and candy dispensers. Some of the more traditional and rarer collectables like comics still command astronomical prices – the debut issue of Batman will set you back a quarter of a million dollars. The unconventional collectables often have hefty price tags too. Recently a lock of John Lennon’s hair sold for $47,000, and a pink cocktail dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ fetched $200,000.

Despite these prices, collecting remains fundamental to the human psyche and within reach of everyone. It always will, because there will always be something to collect. My four year old loves to collect leaves. A while ago when I asked him how many leaves he had yet to collect to complete his collection, he thought about it for a few moments before replying:

“When I’ve got one from every tree.”

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

Order, order…

Continuing from last week’s Outliers post, I’m going to consider some of the more extreme things one could collect. Think not ‘extreme’ as in extreme sport, where goatee-bearded men on motorcycles roar off a 100 metre ramp only to rejoin their machines (after somersaults and a quick guzzle of the Sponsor’s product) three minutes later in another State. Think ‘extreme’ as in extreme possibilities.

Think animals. It would be rather daunting to collect the whole set – there seems to be an awful lot of them. Let’s see, you’ve got your five animal kingdoms, they each contain a number of phyla, which in turn contain classes. A class has orders, they hold families, which contain genuses (not geniuses – very few families have those), before you finally drop down to species level. Oh, and sub-species. Hmm.

In terms of collecting animals, many categories are kind of self limiting. Take giraffes. They’re gorgeous and most people would love to have one as a pet. Collecting-wise, there aren’t that many different species of them, you can’t get them at your local pet store, and they’re also very large – out of reach of most collectors. On the other side of the vast taxonomical savannah, however, is something more accessible. More collectable. Insects.

In a square mile of farmland, it has been suggested, there are more insects than all of the people on Earth. Chances are, there’d be a fair few in your backyard too – so you’re already an insect collector… probably without even realising it.

What they lack in size, insects make up in sheer numbers. Over 80% of all known species are insects. There’s an insect for everyone, and everyone knows an insect. Maybe it’s one of the 1,400 types of flea tagging along on your dog, the 1,900 types of termite undermining your foundations, or the 6,000 types of roach documented thus far. And they’re just the niche bugs.

Let’s assume an average sized insect is two centimetres long, and it would fit (with spacing around the outside) in a glass-lidded specimen box maybe four by five centimetres, and maybe two centimetres deep. If you were collecting Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) like this, you’d just fit all 150,000 of them in a generously-sized home. Of course, they’d cover every wall, floor to ceiling, and you could forget about windows or doors. If your partner had a thing for Orthoptera (grasshoppers, around 20,000 species), you could kiss the floor goodbye as well.

Should you possess a complete collection of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), you could put unique species end to end and they would stretch across the Golden Gate bridge. All 2.3 kilometres of it.

And, if you had one of each of the 370,000 types of beetle (Coleoptera), all in their little wooden specimen boxes, they’d pack out a double decker bus.

Nearly.

You’d still have room for a giraffe.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]