I have a large shell collection, which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Perhaps you’ve seen it.
Steven Wright
I have a Pony
1997
Pez dispensers, schnauzer memorabilia, the baseball cards your brother “should have held on to but didn’t,” are insignificant individually. They needn’t be useful, or beautiful, or even valuable. But when someone eyes them, buys them, and places them on the shelf, they become so. Gathering transfigures random things into a collection. The collector—curious, proud, reverential, bemused, or driven—is playing.
Finder's keepers
Geologists and botanists of the 19th century swept amateurs along as new discoveries rocked the world. Boys collected minerals. Girls pressed flowers. Everyone netted butterflies, so it seemed. Parlors swelled with fascinating whatnots. What did these collections mean? Some revealed an eye for beauty, others a need to capture the world and extend human grasp. All recorded an abiding and playful curiosity.
Carrying a torch for Liberty
Little Celeste Coriene Flaxman fled Odessa and Russia’s cruel pogroms in 1904, bound for Philadelphia on the Miriam. Celeste stayed below decks with her mother when their ship stopped at New York Harbor. But Celeste's four-year-old sister Paula vividly recalled a friendly passenger lifting her to see the Statue of Liberty. That family story became a memory for Celeste’s daughter, Iris November, who celebrated that moment with this collection.
That obscure object of desire
Occasionally news spreads of a fantastic discovery: the first postage stamp with adhesive surfaces is issued, the biplane on a 24-cent U.S. airmail stamp flies upside down, a penny stamp from Mauritius fetches a million bucks at auction. Profit impels some to collect, surely. Curiosity about politics, celebrity, geography, or history moves others. But the real fun for most lies in trying to complete a set.
