The eccentric collections - old postcards, matchbooks, shells and the rest - seem to be in terminal decline, says Edwin Heathcote for the Financial Times.
LONDON: Would you like to come up and see my comic collection? Not, perhaps, the most appealing chat-up line. It might sound a little sexier if you added that a Superman No 1 from 1936 fetched US$5.3 million in 2022.reeks a little too heavily of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, or the insufferable vinyl snobs in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
In the US, membership of the American Philatelic Society peaked in 1988 at nearly 58,000. Last year, there were fewer than half that amount. In the UK, the average age of a collector is over 60. But the decline in collections is perhaps most visible in our homes. As with so many hobbies, there was a sense that these were activities in exile, eccentric pastimes undertaken in isolation in the leftover spaces - lofts, cellars, garden sheds.
So they were stuffed with sculptures and art but also tapestries, antique furniture, cabinets of curiosities, suits of armour, swords, stuffed bears and the rest. Virginia Woolf’s acknowledgment that it was her independent means which allowed her a room of her own in which to think and write highlights exactly how rare a privilege this was.
Self-expression now comes in more obvious and socially mediated forms and doesn’t need to be sublimated in a stamp album. Perhaps as we spend more time in a gym than poring over collections, the site of interest has become the body .
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