Our Obsession with the Passion of Possession   Why collecting strange stuff with no intrinsic value pleases so many

“Man is seldom content to witness beauty. He must possess it.”

—Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, prime minister of Papua New Guinea

Lately I find myself flipping from one distraction to the next, bored by books and films whose plots I have trod a million times before; bored, perhaps, with myself. I want a passionate, consuming, ever-present interest, constant as breath. A quest strong enough to soak up any extra cash or time without regret. A chase so exciting, I will want to show the world all I find.

I want to collect something.

“You don’t have the gene,” my husband informs me. He is convinced that collecting is hard-wired, with half the world indifferent to deliberate, themed accumulation and the other half driven by it. He has the gene. Me, I shy away from even the most magnificent obsessions, afraid such a pursuit would cause me to give short shrift to the rest of the world, sink into debt, lose perspective, lose oxygen. Things weigh you down. Even beauty must be dusted or oiled or locked up or schlepped.

I retort that I already collect—adventures and aphorisms and eccentric friends, and when necessary, my own thoughts. But what matters to real collectors, it seems, are objects. Objets, the French word meaning not just an inert lump of stuff but something so adored, it elicits passion simply by existing. Why does no such object call my name?

I collect some collectors and grill them. Often the origin stories are flashbacks: sweet or stirring memories that act on the psyche years later. A woman who, as a child, was made to visit her aged grandmother every week, and who distracted herself from misery by playing with her grandmother’s costume jewelry, now collects brooches and necklaces of the same vintage. A man who used the forced gaiety of clowns to brighten a painful boyhood collects Bozo kazoos, Bozo banks, Bozo lamps, Bozo lunchboxes, Bozo marbles, and Bozo books (including one called Too Many Bozos).

“Collecting gives you a safe space, a focus for the mind, a goal, a mystery,” one friend explains. Because I envy him this, I am startled when he asks to stay anonymous. “Because it’s weird,” he says with a shrug. “Once you get off the beaten track, where the most interesting stuff is, people just don’t understand. So it becomes your private world.”

Collectors are people who stay happily awake late at night, searching with pure and personal focus instead of clicking where the influencers tell us to click. Collectors know what they are looking for—and will go to absurd lengths to get it. Charles Gunther, a nineteenth-century caramel confectioner, had a Confederate prison pried apart and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Chicago, where he reassembled it to house his inimitable collection. Into that prison went Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed, a smattering of shrunken heads, and a thin brittle skin that had been shed, he insisted, by the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Such collections dazzle me. Their selections, authentic or not, are a little burst of personality, like the boozy middle of a chocolate cherry. But after a while, the wonders pall, and I start to find the sheer quantity exhausting. One of anything seems enough.

How do I make sense of others’ need to amass material objects, the stuff of the earth, and cram them into the crevices of their own lives, when I am constantly trying to sweep mine away? If I am to collect, it will have to be something tiny, easy to smuggle or store. I am not generous enough to embrace a collection that lives somewhere else, then visit to tend it, like those noble souls who weed and sweat in community gardens. That is the way the world should be—and the way I am not. I guess I am more territorial than I like to think, or more private. Or just selfish. Possessive, that is the word.

Yet the idea of all I would learn by possessing themed objects tantalizes me. All the connoisseurs I would meet along the way; all the places, at the risk of sounding like Dr. Seuss, that I would go. I imagine collecting as plucking, from a vast orchard, a choice bit of the world’s abundance. Or hunting truffles—rare, precious, and expensive, requiring discernment and experience, or a smart poodle, to sniff them out.

What might my truffle be? I jot a list of pleasing objects—antique maps, Arts & Crafts tiles, Art Deco perfume bottles—but could any of them inhabit my being for years on end? Ideally, I will stumble into my quest, the way collectors decide on sterling lighters of the James Bond era or Russian nesting dolls. But I am afraid that, conditioned by years of minimalism, I will stifle such an impulse before it has a chance to take hold.

•  •  •

The Bozeum (courtesy of Tom Holbrook)

“Fifty-four years times 365 is how many days I’ve spent with Bozo,” says Tom Holbrook, adding dryly, “I’m crazy, and it keeps me from going insane.” Like the Bozo collector mentioned above, Holbrook grew up in Chicagoland, where “the show every kid had to watch every single day without fail was Bozo’s Circus.” He gasped at the acts, chortled at the pie fight, loved the skits and songs and above all, Bozo, who was “always smiling, always trying to make you happy.”

Holbrook’s mom bought him a bendable rubber Bozo, and from there, he says, “it seemed that material just gravitated to me.” (It no doubt helped that he walked around giant flea markets holding up a sign that said Bozo on both sides.) In adulthood, he befriended Bozo’s creator, who wrote the foreword to Holbrook’s first book on Bozo.” By then, Holbrook had become an entertainer himself—magician, balloon twister, clown, then Bozo himself, subbing for Larry Harmon, the performer who owned the creative rights to Bozo, at variety shows and events.

He continued collecting, letting the exuberance of those lost little-kid days fizz in his bloodstream. “It was one of those secret things only my really close friends knew,” he says. “The guy who collects a clown.” It was also a way to gauge social change (times were no longer so simple) and “caretake and respect what is old. Oh, wow, this Bozo record is from 1946! There’s a completionist urge, too. Though with Bozo, there is always going to be something you don’t have.”

Tommy Holbrook’s collection—which he named the Bozeum “to give it its own identity”—gave him a place in the world, an expert’s street cred, reliable joy, and a legacy. And then it took on a life of its own.

•  •  •

Bozo’s appeal is easy to understand: that boppable nose, that perpetual smile. Other seductions are more idiosyncratic. Punk-rock drummer Kitten Sparkles chose lost pet posters; Spike Lee collects World War II propaganda; Quentin Tarantino collects posters from vintage hillbilly exploitation films. Johnny Depp collects insects, animal skeletons, puppets, and dolls; he takes the latter so seriously, he had an ankle bracelet made for his little plastic Lindsay Lohan when the real one went under house arrest. Einstein collected mechanical puzzle toys; Marconi gathered 1,500 different kinds of crickets; Nabokov netted butterflies. Today, every object on earth—not just Napoleon’s mummified penis and Montezuma’s crown but airsick bags, swizzle sticks, yardsticks, and floasters (toasters carried away by a flood)— can find a home in somebody’s collection.

Often, some happy or poignant experience ignites an interest in a certain sort of object. An old favorite toy shrinks the world small again, restoring that innocent joy. Or, people collect what they craved back then and could not have. Men who wanted a fashion Barbie and were shamed for the wanting? They can have a hundred of her now, defy the past’s aspersions.

Collecting can also connect you to fame, letting you stroke and display an object infused with a celebrity’s intimate presence. Ty Cobb’s false teeth brought $7,475 at auction. St. Louis collector Steven Louis Brawley has a heavy metal bell that once hung on Jackie Kennedy’s Christmas tree—and two printer’s mockups of her first husband’s funeral card. (Dulled by shock, she approved the first, then realized the photo was awful and stopped the presses.)

An old snapshot of Jackie Kennedy on horseback (courtesy of Steven Louis Brawley)

As he collected, Brawley’s motivation changed. He began to study the ways lower- and middle-class America resonated with their royal family. Gathering magazine covers of Jackie Kennedy, he watched the shift from adulation to sympathy to, after her marriage to Onassis, disenchantment. Collecting became an entrée to the history profession he had not pursued; he now has several Kennedy books in the works. He sees his role as unearthing, investigating, contributing to the body of knowledge. That means pushing for introductions and access. “I have to tell myself every day to be brave,” he admits. “But collecting has opened doors—actual physical doors. I’ve now been in four of her residences.” He has spoken with members of Jackie’s inner circle. He spoke at her fiftieth college class reunion.

Adam, the first collector, got to label every other creature, creating the first taxonomy. Collectors ever since have catalogued their finds, documented their history, identified subtle differences. By the nineteenth century, people saw collections as symbolic worlds, full of clues to other places and other times. Today’s collectors see how certain objects have been reshaped by technology and trend—from 1950s cotton-candy pink to aubergine, say, or from sharp edges to organic curves. Collections embody history, trace its trajectory, influence what comes next.

“A different, more meaningful, more ordered world can speak out of things as humble as old shoes or bottles,” notes German historian Philipp Blom. Barbie collectors know the lineage of her face sculpts (and therefore Western notions of beauty). They know the year she went to the Moon (four years ahead of Neil Armstrong). They even know the number of gold sequins on the first Bob Mackie Barbie (five thousand, a goosing of glamour). Connoisseurship confers a weird power: imagine the frisson of being consulted about some obscure detail that only you spotted, some special bit of history only you remember.

Ego aside, collectors have a blast. They have embarked on a global scavenger hunt that brings a rush of elation with every find. As more and more artifacts pile up, the true collector is thrilled to need a bigger box—or display cabinet—or warehouse.

Maria Gianino collects vintage jewelry, and she once bought an entire tabletop of the stuff for a flat sum. Once home, she sifted her trove and discovered a piece signed by a known artist and worth far more than what she had paid for the entire lot. It was a clear win, in an arena where competitors strategize like art thieves—yet that tabletop could just as easily have yielded nothing but faux baubles. At its most intense, collecting is challenging and a little chancy. The sought object must be complicated enough to demand discernment, valuable enough to require a little negotiating finesse, and rare enough to feel magical when acquired.

That thrill is what divides true collectors from savvy dealers, the ones who scoop up an original $3 Barbie because they know she is now worth more than $25,000 or stockpile first-edition comic books to put their kid through college. Purists collect for posterity, the way Noah lined up his aardvark and platypus pairs to repopulate the future. Henry and Emily Folger gathered up so much of Shakespeare, they helped keep the world’s greatest playwright from slipping into the past. A friend who collects everything in the world about a heroic but little-known German nobleman will be able to hand that unique, deep collection to a museum someday. He will live on—and so will she, unless the collection is disassembled.

What a relief, to know your hours on Earth have made a discernible difference. “To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else’s collection rather than one’s own,” wrote Susan Sontag. As collectors hold their latest finds, they are “seeing through them into their distant past,” wrote philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. Inside each object lives “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former owner.”

While I was busy retrieving all this from the past and preserving it for the future, I could—another incentive—let the present fade from view. Freezing time, I would gaze for hours at my trophies, memorizing their contours as one would a lover’s face. Collections are a way to anchor the world—and without such anchors, we can easily slide away. Aging slips the body out from under the mind’s control. Time is a form of entropy. The world as we knew it is disintegrating. Even things, the most solid and reliable bits of reality, will tarnish, crumple, fray, or disintegrate, if they are not properly preserved. They can get lost, get stolen, get broken, fall out of the car and get dragged through the mud.

Maybe I want a piece of the world to hang on to, as more and more of it burns or drowns.

“Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.”

—Claude Lévi-Strauss

With motives established, next comes opportunity—the sourcing, plotting, and scheming of the collection. This, after all, is a murderous hobby. Collectors kill what they gather, “literally in the case of butterflies or beetles,” writes Blom, but “metaphorically in the case of other objects, which are removed from their usual surroundings, functions, and circulation, and placed in an artificial environment, bereft of their former usefulness, turned into objects of a different order, dead to the world.” Which sounds a little melodramatic—until I see Holbrook’s Bozo clown suit hanging limp in the Bozeum, empty of body, the fluffy white pompom buttons drooping.

Collectors ransom and kill their darlings, then resurrect them to half-lives inside a display cabinet. Their adoration is one-sided, yet can spark more passion and offer greater comfort than many traditional couplings. I find this disturbing.

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects,” remarked Benjamin. “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” Is this the definition of a fetish? Benjamin went on to describe “the most profound enchantment…the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.” Which feels keenly capitalistic. Did people collect as avidly in simpler economies, I wonder. Will millennials’ famous preference for experiences permanently alter the pursuit?

I suspect humans will always be capable of obsession. “It is not for love of art; it is voraciousness,” Catherine the Great said of her 4,000 paintings, 10,000 gemstones, and 38,000 books. “I am not an amateur. I am a gourmandizer.”

What of less sophisticated animals? Magpies correct our metaphor: they do not collect. They abhor shine and bling, and their nests are minimalist. But satin bowerbirds, like brides, collect things that are blue, amassing blue feathers, shells, and chip packets until their nests mirror the sky. Lacewings spear trash (rotting vegetation, bits of others’ carcasses) and carry this assemblage on their backs. And then you have the packrats, and the greedy squirrels….

Most animals who collect are simply hoarding. Are we?

“There is a thin line,” concedes Gianino, who just opened Hallmark Auctions with her husband, “Collecting becomes a compulsion: you get one, and you just have to have another and another.”

Enough people collect—the usual estimate is one in three, in the thing-rich U.S.—to normalize the compulsion. The hunger is deeply personal but easy to rationalize. Collecting a particular object feels somehow less selfish than simply piling up money or luxuries. But when you are bidding on a rare objet at auction, and somebody overseas has entered a bid online, and the phone rings with a telephone bid—the adrenaline rush can be crazymaking.

“And then people are like, ‘What did I buy that for? Why did I spend that much money?” says Gianino. “Even we can’t always figure out what attracts people to buy the things they buy.”

Russell W. Belk, who studies consumer behavior, says that when we collect, “we are creating a small world where we feel secure. We can succeed because we have defined success narrowly enough.” I cannot write a profound and stylistically perfect essay, but I could find and buy arty crystal shot glasses….

As for the experiences and eccentrics I claimed to “collect,” I now realize that I am only what I despise most: an accumulator. This sad fact was obscured by the invisibility of what I accumulate. But because I am not systematic—because people cannot (or should not) be classified and tagged, and there is no predictable way to locate the next amusing friend or adventure—I simply notice when one shows up and grab for it. That is not collecting.

What would be? The acquisition of Beanie Babies or Pez dispensers is easy to pass up. But I would consider hunting for those wonderful old hotel keys, the brass heavy enough to remind you to return the key after your assignation. There is no romance, no story, in a magnetized plastic rectangle.

Or maybe I need a cabinet of curiosities. In the Renaissance, those with brains and money gathered up as many of nature’s oddities as they could, creating Wunderkammers (German for “rooms of wonder”). My weirdest shells could go there, and the giant molted feathers I once gathered before a bird swooped down to retaliate, and an old drawer of moveable type, and my cow skull. But what a lame cabinet, compared to those that held unicorn horns (usually a male narwahl’s tusk, a tooth that can reach ten feet), Scythian lambs (woolly ferns thought to be animate), dragon eggs, taxidermied platypuses, clockwork automata, and a vial of blood that rained from the sky in the Isle of Wight.

Superstition has long laced the practice, whether in wily assortments of vodou dolls and Tarot cards or the medievalist hunt for relics. Bits of dead saints, they were intended to be worn for inspiration. Imagine, a piece of St. Anne’s heart next to your own. But the frenzied quest soon turned dark. The faithful tore at the body of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia (just one example of many), chopping off her nipples, her fingers, her ears. Too often, the procurers of relics cast holiness aside and substituted idolatry—the pagan faith of any crazed collector.

“The eagerness of objects to/be what we are afraid to do/cannot help but move us.”

—Frank O’Hara

When Batman popped onto the screen of the Brandt family’s first color TV and little Scott saw him jump into the Batmobile, the tingling fascination began. Decades later, he still has his banged-up Batman lunchbox, not to mention a Batman pinball machine and tons of pristine Batman stuff still in its original packaging (therefore worth double), and for a while he even had his own drivable Batmobile. His son sees the cool stuff but cannot pretend to share the original excitement. “Everything is in color now,” Brandt says with a sigh. “Back then, even morals were black and white. Kids could stay innocent.”

Collecting Batman for the most idealistic reasons (courtesy of Scott Brandt)

In adulthood, Brandt’s enthusiasm has shifted to the backstory. He likes that Batman is “a mere mortal. He doesn’t have a superpower; he just uses his mind. And it’s tragic—a thug killed his parents in front of him, and he decides to do good. It’s that ability to overcome, to be a voice of reason, to stand against evil and tyranny.” He breaks off, laughing a little at his own eloquence. Then he adds, offhand but secretly serious, “We need a Batman now.”

He collects the stuff to honor the idea.

•  •  •

Meaning layers itself into any collection. Reading books about collecting, though, feels like overbidding for a fake. Most of the early works were written by enthusiasts who shovel in minutiae, unable to conceal their own passion. Then came the dealers hoping to jack up value, the curators flattering their donors. And after Freud, the genre twisted psychosexual, with collecting branded an “anal-erotic” practice.

Come now. Even I collected stuff as a kid: rocks, first, then seashells. I pored over the rocks’ cracked-open crystals and the shells’ secret whorls, their satiny interiors a pale chiffon pink. They taught me nature, let me touch its wonders.

Freud himself collected Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, bringing his latest acquisitions to the dinner table so he could admire them while he ate. He then carried them to his office, where he would choose one—the little alabaster baboon of Thoth, perhaps, or the statue of Athena—and clutch it like a child latches onto a stuffed bear, drawing solace from the ancients while analyzing his patients. One wonders how he would have deconstructed his own collecting rituals, which began just one year after he wrote that when “an old bachelor collects snuffboxes,” he is finding a substitute for amorous conquests.

(Or, he likes snuffboxes.)

•  •  •

Still, loving a certain sort of object does flesh out a self, fill an emptiness, sprinkle a little gold dust. You possess something your rivals do not—and may never—possess. Your choice reveals something important about you.

Anne Schuster’s penguinalia started inauspiciously, when her mom brought her a penguin T-shirt from the Smithsonian zoo. Now friends and family give her penguin everything, and when the tree goes up in December, she and her son do the Penguin Count (forty-three ornaments last check). Her collection is casual, nowhere near the Guinness world record of more than 26,000. But it warms her.

“They’re such fun creatures,” she says. “They are very caring to their young, and they mate for life.” Divorced and wry about it, Schuster mothers with her whole heart. “In Australia, I watched them bring back food at dusk for their babies, which were huddled in the sand at the water’s edge, waiting. Often penguins are out in the cold in a very harsh environment. They can put up with a lot.” Under her breath, she adds, “I have, too.”

She sees the connection, but for others, it remains a mystery. “In their choices, collectors often give voice to completely hidden, previously unsuspected facets of their inner selves,” observes the French art historian René Brimo. If I collect, I imagine I will discover affinities with certain objects, time periods, textures, or shapes. I will also discover dead spaces where desire stays flat. Either can reveal.

Will I be the scrounger type, wildly eager, or methodical, aware of exactly what the collection needs next? Will I look for a single example of everything within a particular category or a specific type of object in all its iterations? Will I be a flamboyant exhibitionist, buttonholing strangers to show them what I found, or will I turn squirrelly, consumed by private ardor? In The Cultures of Collecting, Jean Baudrillard notes that collectors often “maintain about their collection an aura of the clandestine, of confinement, secrecy, and dissimulation, all of which give rise to the unmistakable impression of a guilty relationship.” Yet in the end, “it is invariably oneself that one collects.”

•  •  •

When you collect, you are making a commitment to share your life with certain objects—lots of them. I would be the one blurting, “I need space.” My poor friend Jenn found monkeys amusing until the hundredth friend gave her a monkey something. “Please,” she begged us all, “stop!”

For the true collector, though, each new object is a wish fulfilled. It drops another anchor in life’s roiling sea; it hands the performing self another prop. On Facebook, a collector of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles describes a devastating house fire and all she lost. Her family needs to find a new home and start over, yet the first thing she does with the insurance money is buy a few of her lost action figures. Nothing, she explains, would go further to make her feel at home again.

Seriously? Not pajamas, or a set of cereal bowls? I both hate and love this absence of utility.  Collecting is an utterly impractical pursuit; these objects will not be used, transferred, cashed in, or weaponized. They will sit there, preening on display like aged beauty queens waiting to be admired again. In this transactional world, the lack of practical value ought to be refreshing—yet it makes me a bit nervous. Money poured into uselessness? Objects just taking up space? All that time, money, and energy some might label “wasted”? All that mercurial passion?

As vectors of desire, collectibles trigger wildly irrational prices and bidding wars. One’s mood swings from elation over a find to despair after a lost chance. Collecting would hitch my emotional life to a bunch of stuff. On the other hand, I would rule a tiny world of my own making. I might even be tempted to stay there, rather than throw my energy into the riskier, murkier world we all share.

Are collectors growing even more obsessed, I wonder, as the world feels increasingly out of control?

•  •  •

So many possibilities (Shutterstock)

“He didn’t know why he was chasing down exhausted objects.”

—Don DeLillo in Underworld

This pursuit was once elitist: the first collectors were kings, queens, and potentates, followed by the fabulously wealthy. In the 1630s, tulip mania raised the price of one bright bulb to ten times the average annual wage of a metalsmith. In the late 1700s, archaeological digs in Pompeii and Herculaneum fanned interest in antiquities, starting an anticomania craze that plundered Greece. Queen Christina of Sweden had her generals seize oil paintings and alabaster statues from Emperor Rudolf II just days before the Peace of Westphalia, which could have scotched the treaty. Philip von Stosch was so passionate about gemstones, he became a spy for the British government—and stole from the collections he was invited to visit.

That was the era of high-powered collecting. But by the 1920s, anybody could collect broken pottery and Milk of Magnesia bottles and build the Watts Towers. And in the 1950s, mass production made it possible to buy up a bunch of cheap stuff that, brought together in one room, took on a greater significance, offering a gestalt of cultural commentary. This democratization of collecting made room for irony. Campy light-up statues of the Blessed Virgin. Neon-bright plastic toys as contemporary décor, mocked and relished at once. People started stockpiling what they once would have pitched, giving it a cynical twist to be clever.

But no matter how ironic, “every collection is kitsch,” maintains Paul van der Grijp. It is kitsch because it is superfluous, a bid for a certain kind of happiness and a denial of the death that will yank it away. “Kitsch is the desperate need to die gemütlich,” comfy and smug and cheerful, thus denying the reaper his grim victory. Look at William Randolph Hearst, an avid collector so terrified of death that his staff members painted dead trees green until they could replace them….

Careful, I warn myself: you are tipping toward Freudian nonsense. Plenty of collectors savor beauty and knowledge and stay alive to the resonance of the past. They are not avoiding death or reality. They just like putting what they love together so it means even more.

Also, they maybe have the gene.

Is there a gene?

“I think it might be a little more psychological,” my friend Tonya says gently. “What you collect fills a certain need or desire in you. Maybe you never had something like that, that you wanted but couldn’t have?”

Or maybe I repressed the wanting. Money was scarce, and I have never tolerated unmet desires well. Rather than be frustrated, I would far rather decide (pretend?) that what I wanted was not so great anyway. Besides, does stuff ever give us what we demand from it? “Too many shamans have ruled over our ancestors,” van der Grijp points out, “for us to recognize that the paraphernalia of a kind of happiness do not contain that happiness within them.”

No, but the process might. I hear of a man who owns 2,682 tapes of the same movie, Titanic. “It gets pretty wild, with hundreds of cardboard boxes and packages cascading over my dining table,” he says happily.

To me, this is crisis. Because I lack the gene?

“I don’t think it has anything to do with temperament,” my anonymous friend says. “I don’t think collecting is always about—I mean, it is about stuff, but it’s more like you’re on this quest to find a missing puzzle piece. Collectors are not just interested in the object. They are interested in its origins, its journey.” Artists of a sort, they select their materials with care and discrimination, learn their world, bring their project to perfection.

Or stop short, so the game never ends.

What is it like to work obsessively toward completion, knowing it will end your fun? The wanting will be over, the tension that ratcheted into frenzied craving will be relieved. And the place where it lived will be empty.

What you collected first gained value by being absent, hotly sought. Once attained, it can be savored, but the thrill of conquest is over. And in time, your triumphant collection will probably be scattered or trashed.

I am not sure I can bear to collect.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.