Crap by Wendy A. Woloson

Author:Wendy A. Woloson [Woloson, Wendy A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

Making the Modern Collector

Simply calling something a “collectible” or “collector’s item” or “something collected” is enough to set it apart from other material artifacts (useful things like tools and appliances, and things to be literally consumed, like food). By dint of occupying its own category and special space, the “collectible” is distinguished from and elevated above other pedestrian objects. Collectibles also draw from histories of collecting practices that are linked to the surplus time, money, and knowledge possessed by the elite. During the Enlightenment, for instance, royalty kept Wunderkammern, or “wonder rooms”—cabinets of curiosity containing weird and fascinating objects from remote places and people. Wunderkammern were status symbols that showed their owners’ mastery and possession of the physical realm.2

Most humans collect things, though it isn’t clear why. Some scholars believe the impulse comes from our need to order the world as a way to understand it—the “material embodiment” of classification. Collecting shows “how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appropriate, and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have inherited.”3 Others see collecting as a kind of psychological malady born of neurosis and maladaptation. From this perspective, collectors are not just “dedicated” and “serious” but “infatuated” and “beset” by an “all-consuming drive.” They are compelled by an insatiable “hunger” toward the next acquisition, their “habit” pursued with a “chronic restiveness.”4 And still others see collecting as an intimate practice of self-fashioning and memory-making. For them, collections create highly personal material worlds within which people can feel comforted and comfortable. The individual items in those collections serve as memory objects that invite recollections about their acquisition and perhaps offer a connection to the past.5

Motivated by these factors or a combination of them, Americans in the mid-nineteenth century began building collections. “Stamp mania” was one of the first collecting crazes, initially pursued by middle- and upper-class women who had leisure time, were attracted to the aesthetic qualities of stamps, and considered activities such as indexing and arranging to be productive and educational pursuits. Increasingly, though, the pastime became segregated by gender. After the Civil War, men took up the hobby in greater numbers, likely driven by a number of factors: stamps’ increasing ubiquity, their association with the adventure and discovery of foreign places, and their direct connection to monetary systems (since in many cases stamps could be used in lieu of currency). Women continued to collect “junk stamps by the millions,” according to one historian, “but a woman philatelist was rare, indeed.”6 The masculinization of stamp collecting cast it as a serious and cerebral activity. In a sense, stamp collecting was another way, like Wunderkammern, for collectors to colonize and then impose order on foreign lands and people. Stamp brokers, practicing a new occupation, offered bounties on used stamps and helped collectors think of their hobby as an outgrowth of intellectual pursuits rather than collecting passions.7

Collecting coins and commemorative medals, too, was a male province. Aficionados of the allied hobbies of philately and numismatics often branched out into other masculine collecting fields such as antiquities and natural history specimens.

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