Its an in-built human condition. Some are aware of it and conscientiously collect things, seek them out and may even pay a lot of money for them and some are not so and to the outsider appear to live like slobs. In a world of chaos.

I am not sure which I camp I fall in, but I am certainly not a slob.

I transgress. This global human condition has allowed history to be preserved from the museum quality priceless piece to the random 60′s TV show memorabilia on the dusty shelf in the dinning room. Its all collected, catalogued, categorised and cherished.

Why?

For historians and curators of museums, the answer is quite obvious. For individuals that have spent a life-time collecting hat-pins or tobacco pipes: what’s the ultimate purpose?

The Library of Alexandria was collecting books from all over the world over 4000 years ago. Charles Darwin had a vast collection of fossils and rocks from expeditions he undertook in the Beagle in the 1800′s. Education and knowledge is the reasoning behind these collections.

One reason for humans to naturally be drawn to collecting things could go back to “hunter-gather” times when early humans hunted and gathered and collected food and life-stock. Understanding the change of seasons and the lack of food-stocks for long periods in a year and adapting a strategy to counteract this problem. As humans had more time to spend doing leisure activities and began to travel and explore, collecting became more and more habitual.

A proof in point: My four-year-old has already begun his seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloguing, displaying, storing and maintaining. He has in a very short period of time acquired, from a number of sources and through a number of techniques, a vast collection of hedgehogs in all forms and sizes. Furry, porcelain and now prickly and stuffed (thanks to a crazy dad who saw one at a fair and could not resist).

For us “ordinary people”, we collect to preserve memories, recapture the nostalgia of childhood or for the obsessive love of a subject-matter.

I certainly do it for the love of it (as well as being addicted to it!) and one obvious thread is that we all collect to save something.

Why do you collect?

They are all mint in their boxes, neatly stacked in the back of his cupboard. Seldom seeing the light of day and never exposed to the elements: the harsh and unpredictable British weather.

He would have a stroke if his vintage Vans were harmed in anyway!

This is something he has done for at least the last 15 or 16 years! Let’s just say, he LOVES trainers! Big Time!

But getting into the mind of a collector is not always so black and white. The passion for collecting one type of object or genre is a lot deeper than the love of an object.

The damp smell of a basement store or the glimpse of an old toy in an antique shop window and feelings, memories and emotions can fly. The pulse races, a warm feeling rises from below the diaphragm up through the chest and in to the head and down to the tips of the fingers. It can be indeed very powerful. I know you know what I mean.

But not all collecting and or collections serve a purpose beyond that of the collector. A collection of size 9 trainers would only be useful to another collector with size 9 feet and so on. Some collections, no matter how small however, can serve a huge purpose both to the collector and for future collectors alike.

Some collections, like old glass bottles, can map out the history, tradition and evolution of a subject matter or object. Showing how techniques started and how they developed through the ages.

Small collections are sometimes pieces of a much larger puzzle.

An interesting find recently in Cornwall (UK) was of an old Native American birch bark canoe, discovered in a barn on the Enys estate near Penryn, having been brought back from Canada by their relative who fought in the American war of independance. The family had found the canoe whilst clearing the barn and realised that it was very old and possibly of great significance. So much so, the finders contacted the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario to inform them of the find.

It was concluded, after official inspection that the canoe was over 250 years old and the only one known of it’s kind and very important in the history of Native American canoe making. The family decided to pass the canoe on to the museum in Canada.

A truly amazing find and a fabulous ending to the discovery!

I can only imagine the excitement of finding such a historically significant item. A real rush I am sure.

The significance of preserving this canoe for the many many years it was stored only became apparent when it was discovered.

A missing piece to a larger collection and a small piece that has added to a bigger picture.

I sometimes wonder if anything I collect will contribute to social or anthropological history in the future or will my kids just be calling the BBC’s “Car Booty” and “Flog It” as soon as I’m gone?

To be continued….

If you didn’t know or had noticed yet, from the day you were born, you were a collector. Whether it is by self or by proxy, the world around you, including the consumer world is geared towards collecting and “collections”.

You cannot escape it. Whether your innocently drinking your calming cup of Tetley Tea and munching on your perfectly browned Hovis slice of toast heavily layered in thick Lurpak butter or if your carrying out your mundane chore of filling the car up at the local petrol station, you are actively encouraged to collect. Loyalty Points, drinking glasses, loyalty stickers for coffee, or toast racks, egg cups and butter dishes. These are but a few examples of the items we are encouraged to collect. Any and every company worth its salt is continuously and heavily promoting their brand cleverly, through collections of merchandise.

This practice is not new and sales advertising and promotion can be found as far back as the Ancient Egyptians through papyrus sales messages and wall posters. We are all victims of it and we actually love it. You know you do. Whether its be because you like getting something for free or its because you have a genuine love for the brand and their merchandise.

As humans, we have a natural tendency to gather, order and collect. It’s not only logical to collect, but it’s a mark of our efficiency in ordering the world around us. We can’t help ourselves, many of us do it inadvertently and most of us do it voluntarily. We just love it.

Most interesting is that fact the collecting habits of humans goes back to prehistoric man collecting objects such as rocks for early tools.

The natural drive of humans of collect, collate various kinds of items has allowed humans to preserve history and understand the past and sometimes better the future. Charles Darwin was a huge collector as were many scientists and aristocrats of the time and

The earliest “collectable” collectables where early the cigarette cards given with packets of cigarettes and tobacco around the early twentieth century. These consisted of a series of images of actors and actresses of the time or sports personalities amongst other subject matters.

I collect therefore I am.

The lure of possibly finding that missing piece of a collection or an under-priced piece of art deco pottery or silverware is just too great a force, that not going in and having a rummage would haunt your mind for hours after the event.

In a strange way, the musty smell that wafts up your nose whilst rifling through a box of old vinyl 45s is comforting and exciting. Many a great find has been found in musky, damp places.

Many purist collectors would turn their nose up at a damaged item. Personally, damage on some things adds to the character of the item. Sometimes, an item is far too nice, rare or collectable, to just dismiss because it has a tiny old chip or a fine crack or scratch. When I find a damaged piece, I sometimes imagine how it could have happened and can get submerged in a world of thought about who owned it and how the world was at that time. Am I alone here?

To me, every piece has a story to tell.

Humanity at every level collects and accumulates stuff. From the very young to the very old. I was at a child’s birthday party last week and among the usual chaos and mayhem of wild screaming kids running in all different directions and occasionally in to each other, was this sweet girl collecting off the floor, the popped balloons that where exploding everywhere. I thought to myself; how nice of the girl to tidy up. In fact, the little girl informed me enthusiastically, “I’m collecting them!”. I asked her why and the look on her face matched perfectly what came out of her mouth: “I, I, I….. don’t know”. She then ran off at great speed at the sound of another popping balloon on the other side of the hall.

As interesting as it is that humans have this inbuilt mechanism that causes us to collect and catalogue all sorts of stuff, some of us seem to take this a step too far: these are the completists.

Completists are collectors who attempt to collect an example of every item in a particular field or category of sub-category as a hobby. In its original usage and inception, completist referred particularly to owning the complete vinyl pressings of a particular artist, usually a Jazz musician. Nowadays it can refer to virtually anything.

With the origins of the word in 1951 (Merriam-Webster), completists will seek out, hunt down and attempt to obtain every piece of art by a particular artist, every version of a particular song or every book by a particular author. Such endeavours are often very time consuming and can sometimes be very expensive for the collector.

There are countless collectors out there that are hunting down pieces for their collections and that many spend large portions of their lives hunting a particular object. I had one customer that had been searching for a book for 16 years before a copy of it turned up on my site. She was so excited about it when she contacted me and I could feel the nostalgia and joy expressed in her emails. Unfortunately, I also felt her pain when I told her it had just been sold. Typical.

Recently (and still airing), BBC Radio 4 have been airing a five part series on this very subject matter. Presented by journalist Ian Marchant and exploring the collections of five completists and there need to tick off their collection.

If you search the word “completist” on any popular web search engine, you will find sites dedicated to the completism of many a particular subject. From completist guides to musicians like Frank Zappa to completist guides to Star Wars memorabilia (Gus and Duncan’s Comprehensive Guide to Star Wars Collectibles). Written by two guys with a love for collecting Star Wars, Gus Lopez and Duncan Jenkins, who spent half a decade researching the subject to compile this amazing 57 chapter compendium. Duncan Jenkins collected started collecting and creating his first database of items from the beginning in 1977!

Completists come in varying degrees of “obsessive” collecting and cataloguing. Some completists are indiscriminate and will only have in mind the completion of the collection. Other completists are a lot more careful with their acquisitions and will only seek sealed mint copies of vinyl or perfectly boxed vintage games. Some completists will collect a particular thing like radios or butterflies and some can be even more specific like every form of Opitmus Prime from Transformers.

I do think its harsh to call such collecting as obsessive but in many ways it is a form of extremism. Extremist Collecting.

I’m not an extreme completist, now an adult. But as a child, I think I was. In fact, I think most children who get into collecting as a child have an element of completist-ism in them; like early obsessions with hedgehogs (my middle child) or when they just have to have every trading card in the latest set of Pokemon (or whatever they collect in the playground these days).

I collect different themes and objects. I am an eclectic collector. In the world of fantasy, where I live in a huge house with outhouses and ample storage space (and shed loads of money), I think I would be a completist. However, my collecting interests are far too wide to allow me in reality or spatially to completely complete any collection to any purist complitist standard.