ON COLLECTING

I've talked here, directly or indirectly, about many of my 
collections, but I haven't really opened up the subject of 
collecting as a whole. That's funny really because privately I feel 
like more of a success in the task of collecting things than most 
of my other endeavours in life. I haven't thought about why I feel 
that way until now. It's probably becuase the goals are entirely 
set by me. I like to entertain the idea of showing someone, well, 
some girl, around it all, but it's never happened and fundamentally 
that doesn't matter because it's all about what _I_ find 
interesting. The goal is achieved when I feel satisfied by looking 
though the things I've obtained, they don't have to interest 
others, they don't have to work. I can pursue those too, but that's 
a separate activity, if it fails it doesn't harm how I feel about 
the collection itself.

As such I don't get too hung up on the sorts of popular collecting 
patterns - hoping to complete a set of everything within a range, 
or to climb up the chain of item values. Nor do I bother to 
document anything very well - certainly not to the extent of all 
those people with collection websites that must have taken endless 
hours to compile. I do try to display things in attractive 
arrangements where space allows, but that's about as active as I 
get in collector behaviour beyond actually buying the things I 
collect.

Perhaps that's unusual, perhaps not. As usual I don't have a firm 
reference with other people because I don't know any similar 
collectors. The one I did know was certainly my grandfather on my 
mother's side, whose militaria collection was as extensive as the 
physical limits of the house would allow (a little more than that 
actually - the attic of their house collapsed under the weight of 
it once). He definitely liked showing it off and talking about it 
with people. Indeed he often gave public talks. Walking sticks were 
one of his other passions, and for a talk on them I took some 
photographs of his collection, some of which I later uploaded here:

gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/ambulistics/

I inherited many of the odd bits from his militaria collection, 
joining bits and pieces inherited from my other grandfather who 
worked on aircraft instrumentation during the war, and some bought 
cheaply from ham radio hobbyists. Some is valuable, much isn't, 
however things like documents, which usually have very minimal 
value, still facinate me particularly. Photos and documents are 
also the few things I can really share with interested people, 
presuming they exist, via the internet in the History Snippets 
section here or on the Internet Archive. It's a shame that the 
process is so time consuming though, and often sub-optimal without 
spending lots of money on expensive scanning/photographic gear. My 
motivation certainly isn't helped by the fact that online 
catalogues show similar items in the collections of Australian 
libraries who have actual funding (from my tax money, no less) to 
preserve documents and _they_ don't do anything to digitise them 
(or do, and then charge for accessing the digitised versions). What 
am I doing living poor and spending time on digitising documents 
when people who are paid a wage for preserving them don't do that 
themselves (publicly, at least)?

But perhaps it's those sort of frustrations with people that the 
core hobby of collecting itself counters. You don't have to worry 
about the person/company/government who made an item, or even who 
else wants the item if you don't intend to sell it, once you have 
it everything is in your control. I do want to be in control of 
things at heart, and as much as people escape me, my collectables 
are stuck inanimately within my grasp.

I might follow this up with some posts about my specific 
collections. Or not.

 - The Free Thinker