Clueless Collector

Originally posted March 15th 2023

*Firstly, a note on changes to this substack: From April onwards, I will be doing only two substacks a month, one essay and one end of the month roundup. Just for the sake of sustainability and to be sure that the essays aren’t rushed out when I realise it’s Tuesday and I haven’t written anything. Thank you all for the support so far!

I am a purveyor of things. The love of physical media is perhaps a remnant of a 90s childhood (not to be a 90s kid but it can’t be helped), I’m not sure if my resistance to a completely digital life is because of my age or because I am like a magpie. I just really like things. My reaction to the 2010s rise of minimalism was a scoff, I am of the opinion that most minimalists have no sense of taste so to hide that they have nothing at all. Being minimalist doesn’t mean everything has to be grey, you know. But this isn’t a call for total maximalism either, I think you can easily fall into the poorly made rabbit hole that is internet shopping. Consumerism loves a collector, but a good collector doesn’t fall for cheap thrills.

I have met many a collector, mainly collectors of books. Most of these people’s time spent collecting is not buying anything. It’s years of research and building relationships, the art of collecting is more about what you don’t buy really. A good collector knows that most “Collectors Editions” are mass produced, not worth anything more than novelty. There is a place for novelty in collecting too, but you have to be smart about it. You have to know your own taste.

Taste is the most important part of collecting in my opinion. Unless you collect as part of your job (and even then, taste is vital), but that’s a different collector. What I’m talking about today is the personal collector. Someone who collects for one reason or another for themselves, to fill up apartment shelves, to curate the walls of their home, to build around them something that affirms them. I think everyone is a collector of something, whether conscious or not. Have you not ever gone to the beach and been tempted to take a nice shell home with you? There is something innate to collecting, how many childhood friends had a rock collection? Or a fascination with bugs? The bookworm proudly displaying the entirety of the Redwall series. Children are the most rampant collectors, little scavengers stuffing crab shells into their pockets until the smell gets them (I never did that, what are you talking about?). This is why I don’t think of collecting as a capitalist hobby, I believe we have always been creatures of appreciation.

A collector is the utmost sentimentalist, for what other reason could someone bring things into their home to the point of overwhelming them, if not for sentimentality? Now, a collector and a hoarder are often compared, but I believe the difference is care. A hoarder does not care for their things, they are simply afraid of losing their things. It is a compulsion, much like how OCD works, where the mind tricks itself into believing something terrible will happen and one must fulfill the compulsion or the doom will strike. In the case of the hoarder, the compulsion is to hold onto everything. It is a mental health issue not to be taken lightly and the comparison to a collector leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I say this because many have joked, and perhaps I myself have even been guilty of this, that I am a hoarder. I think I just don’t throw things out so willy-nilly, rarely do you only use a hammer once and I find that same practicality in my things. A vase takes up space yes, but where else would I put flowers? My books, my personal library, are pieces I go back to for reference or pleasure. My record collection helps me trace my life, for I have a bad memory when it comes to myself, but a record I will remember where I bought it, when, who I was with, the price, the weather, if I was happy or sad.

I am also not immune to conspiracy theory and I find the ability for companies on a whim to remove digital items that I paid for (I’m looking at you iTunes) to be an utter sham. I first had the realisation that this could happen in my teens, so now I have a very old hard drive with music and movies that I haven’t updated for nearly a decade but it travels with me regardless. I also enjoy physical media because I’m not necessarily being tracked by my purchases. I don’t need google to know everything about me and buying a record in cash these days feels like I’m getting away with something.

Physical media is also anti-algorithm, you will find things outside of the bubble. Searching a charity shop for cheap CDs because clearly someone in the neighbourhood cleared out their childhood home and found their emo collection which has now become part of my collection. The old guy smoking weed outside the record shop will play you a vinyl you’d never had considered yourself and it becomes one of your favourites. Maybe you will be exhausted by university and your part-time job and a bookseller will suggest In The Distance by Hernan Diaz and because of that you end up becoming a bookseller yourself. I am a collector because by being a collector I meet many other people who love the same things I do and love other things too and show me those and I am a part of something much more than an aesthetic or trend or a curated living room. We trade, we bargain, we whisper of reprints or reissues, someone got scammed, someone opened a new vintage shop down the way but it’s overpriced fast fashion, we’re a bunch of magpies looking for a shiny piece of metal.

My most unjustified collection is my cassette tapes because they don’t age well, they sound terrible and now they’ve become terribly overpriced. The only expensive tape I’ve ever been tempted to buy was a £50 Black Flag tape at World of Echo in Hackney. I chatted with the person who worked there about paying £50 for a tape from the 80s but we both agreed that the genre suits itself to the distortion. That if anything was good on cassette it was hardcore and the few tapes that survived that era. The whole point was that tapes were cheap to make and a way to make money at shows, the tape in the shop might be 1 of only 100 or so made. I didn’t end up buying the tape, I imagine a big Black Flag fan was delighted when they found it. I don’t collect for the sake of collecting, even with the tapes history, I’m not that into hardcore music (is that a lie? Well, I wasn’t that day). A few of my tapes don’t even work, but I don’t mind since they were only 20p. I haven’t the heart to throw them away though, to add another thing to a landfill when it’s perfectly fine on a shelf in my room. I play them when I cook lunch and dinner, making a point to use them even if it damages them in the long run. Things are meant to be used. One day my records will begin to scratch, no matter how well I treat them, the mechanics of the thing dooms it. But I will play them anyway as I do, like clockwork as the sun begins to set. My most recent purchase being Heart Under by the Irish shoegaze band Just Mustard and I am waiting on a reprint of Haley Heynderickx’s wonderful album I Need to Start a Garden.

I love vinyls because they give me the same feeling I got as a teenager listening to CDs. They take my whole attention or at least most of it. Even writing here (Yasmin Williams Urban Driftwood for anyone curious), on the record player I lugged from London to Spain to America within a year, I’m listening to something that draws my attention away from this writing but it is almost like a balancing act. Music and writing, as if to satiate my constantly wandering mind, it can drift along to the music while the rest of me can focus on work. It’s a whole lot easier to figure out what to listen to when going through a box of records on the floor than trying to find the damn albums tab on Spotify (they put it right at the end and you have to open a menu and it’s very annoying, I know it only takes like two seconds but design is intentional, we are weird animals who like things to be convenient they are intentionally placing it where it is so you just listen to a playlist that is never truly on shuffle or another podcast trying to sell you “fun & healthy cereal”). It’s easier to grab a DVD off the shelf than scroll through netflix forever, never making up your mind until you settle on something easy and unintimidating. Easier to go to my local second-hand bookshop or the library than scouring the hellhole that is e-books. I am a collector because I am lazy and know what I like. I don’t need lines of code telling me what I like because most of the time, it’s wrong. Instagram really thinks I like the book Normal People when I’m really not fond of it. Because Instagram knows I like books so it in turn believes I like a book that is, granted, incredibly popular. The thing is I’m not very big on generalised suggestions, end of year wrap ups are nice but only from people who have a strong sense of their own taste. Collectors who are proficient in what they like, not concerned with what I like. Maybe that’s what I’m getting at, finding things through others likes and dislikes and seeing if they match mine, we discover new things through unexplored territory, most people do not care about my vinyl of The Last of Mohicans soundtrack, but there is a lot of excitement when I meet people who do.

This might be a part one of a series on collecting, I feel as though I have just scratched the surface. I am unfortunately rushing this out to make my deadline for tomorrow morning which is one of the reasons why I am changing the schedule.

Thank you for reading,

-Enya xx