Collections

I am a collector. I always have been. Even as a kid, I was always collecting something. For me, it's never really seemed to matter much what I was collecting - rocks, shells, dolls, stamps, tea cups, sea glass, Legos, buttons, lawn gnomes, scrap metal, glass bottles, bones - I've always been on the hunt for something. 

I'm often reminded by my minimalist parents and more tidy roommates that these ever growing piles of useless stuff do not make everyone as happy as they make me, which is why it's so refreshing to stumble across fellow collectors.

Recently, I was thrilled to find myself in company of kindred spirits when a friend convinced me to participate in the Brooklyn Historical Society's Collector's Night. It's an annual event where anyone who wants to can set up a table of their personal collection. The end result is a room full of collections that are beautiful (Hawaiian artifacts, Broadway costumes), unique (vintage cartoons, pizza boxes, taxidermy dressed in Christmas outfits), or just plain weird (I'm looking at YOU, rare penis collector). My friend and I teamed up to present a mixed table of our 2 collections, his matchbooks and my bugs and bones. 

I should've take more pictures of the collection displays. I definitely slacked on that. But to be honest, although the collections were really impressive, (including at least one world record holder) I think that what I loved most about the event was that it didn't seem to matter what someone collected, or whether the other people in the room shared that interest. What mattered was that they collected something. More so than the objects themselves, people were interested in details about the collecting process. How did you start this collection? How do you organize them? Do you research each piece? Does your roommate mind? What else do you collect? They understood the instinct. Like I said, kindred spirits.