The Error World (14 page)

He gave me one of his own designs, an intense mixture of symbols representing ancient tribal beliefs, Kabbalistic languages and swirling celestial bodies. I told him I collected stamps, which also had perforations, so there was a neat link there, and his eyes drifted away. He was too polite to say it, but I sensed his meaning was, '
Now
who's the strange one?' The printing of his blotter art was complex, he explained. 'There are 147 separate layers to enhance the clarity. I send them on a disc to someone in England, and then when this person has enough designs he books a ticket to America, goes over for the weekend, waits to see them printed, and then comes back with fifty copies of each design. I'm not sure where he goes in America. There are certain bits of information I'm happy not knowing.'

Lucifer acknowledges a certain risk attached to his calling. 'People can get rather alarmed if they just see all these sheets lying around. The police use a UV lamp—it will glow if LSD is present, and the lamp will also destroy it. But if you're a collector it's best to have them framed on the wall.' He has recently begun to sell blotters on the website he runs with friends called Hunab Ku (
www.hunabku.biz
). This site, which emerged from a shop in Glastonbury, has been some time in the making, but since fixing 'the time dilation components there is less chaotic flux emanating from the crystalline source'.

Lucifer is fairly new to the game. His enthusiasms run counter to the popular belief that the collecting generation is ageing and not being replaced. He speaks with awe of fellow designers and collectors Rick Sinnett, Alex Grey and James Clements, but in particular he admires the work of Mark McCloud, the creator of the
Alice
blotter and many more. McCloud, who lives in San Francisco and has been busted and acquitted twice for his suspicious-looking hobby, runs what he calls the Institute of Illegal Images. This is by far the largest blotter art collection in the world, with many unique items surviving not as sheets but only as single tabs. McCloud now sells art-print enlargements of the more iconic images for $1,000 each, including
The Mighty Quinn
(an Eskimo looking out to sea),
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
(thought to have been dosed with LSD from Albert Hofmann's own laboratory),
Snoopy
(featuring the dog in shades with what McCloud has described as 'an illegal smile'), and
Gorbachev
('This is the Gorby that brought the Berlin Wall down!').

McCloud is blotter art's archivist, but there has yet to be an official catalogue establishing rarity and pricing structure, and the collecting market has yet to be tested by a major auction house. As with all valuable artefacts, there is also an emerging and convincing line in forgeries. Lucifer said there were about twenty serious collectors in the UK, but he was concerned that not all of them knew how to spot a genuine
Dancing Skeletons
from an impostor.

Not so long ago we seemed to be content to collect the things that made sense, the things that were in the game What Am I Bid? I once played with my dad. The Chippendale chair, the Sheraton bureau, the Ming vase, the Meissen dog. The things they had in common were that they were beautiful, useful or both. It's unlikely that the people from the Tang dynasty argued over whether their work was 'a design classic', or even whether their efforts would one day be collected. But now we seem to collect anything, or claim that two or more of anything is a collection. I tried to think what was the most absurd thing one could collect with deliberation and passion, beyond offspring or money. Butterflies, the first-day covers of the Edwardians; fossils, the Victorian craze; and before then tulips, the madness for which sprung up in the first half of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands and was later mirrored in the orchid mania of the 1980s—these were fads that had a certain logic to them, based either on ephemera or permanence, and upon our appreciation of beauty and diversity. The great naturalists collected specimens to prove their points.

But now we prove nothing beyond our ability to amass things and press 'Buy It Now' on eBay.

And yet, collecting anything makes sense to me. Ten years ago I would have scoffed at people who collected luggage tags, or at least not given them another thought. But now I embrace collectors of car air fresheners and chocolate wrappers, and my impression of strangers or the recently deceased increases when I learn, for example, that Henry Moore's wife Irina was a voracious collector of matchboxes. I have joined the Ephemera Society, where I am one of the youngest members.

I appear in the
Ephemera Society Handbook
as a collector of Tube maps. The Ephemera Society is not interested in stamps, but in things which don't have much of an established market in the wider world, or at least the world beyond Ephemera Society events, often held in Russell Square hotels. These included airline sick bags, Victorian scraps, copies of
Parade
with rusted staples. The things laid out haphazardly on the trestle tables at the Society's biannual sales are mostly printed matter, and often it is only the fact that they were once printed at all that gives them currency. They were meant to inform and then to be thrown away, but some of them survived and are now worth a quid or two. Hotel napkins. Labels from wooden fruit crates.

But what of the non-printed material that we write ourselves as notes and lists? Someone called Yvette phoned—she'll call again tomorrow. Please water the plants while I'm away. A dozen eggs, Frosties, ketchup. And what if we decided to collect these shopping lists and derived pleasure from it? I used to believe that this would be the most absurd thing any collector could aspire to, almost beyond the bounds of comprehension, and then I met someone who collected shopping lists.

Chris Moulin, PhD, a neuropsychologist specialising in Alzheimer's at the University of Leeds, did not volunteer this information from the off. We had been talking for a while about experiments he had conducted that were designed to repair a person's ability to learn. Twenty minutes passed, and then, somewhat sheepishly, he admitted that he collected shopping lists in an album, and told me that his fascination began after he found a list on the floor of a memory clinic which read 'bin liners, memory clinic, lunch'. His favourite is a piece of paper from a supermarket with just one word on it: 'Oil'.

This is not unusual. Marilynn Gelfman Karp has written a large illustrated book about strange collecting passions (it has a terrible title:
In Flagrante Collecto
). According to the dust-jacket, Karp is Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art Professions in the Steinhardt School at New York University, which is itself a valuable collection of the word 'Art'. Her book contains a small section on her own love of shopping lists, and these are catalogued as if they were Roman coins or Renaissance masterpieces: 'I: Group of Shopping Lists, 1991–2004, ink on paper, 3½–4" high; 2. Group of shopping lists, 1987–2004, ink on paper 3½–8½" high.' These include, on a variety of paper, some of it crumpled, the instructions not to forget 'tanning oil, juice boxes, bathing suit, tennis, bottled water, snack bags'; 'breast pads, shredded cheese, 8 pepper, choco'; 'screen 28½ × 50, latch top, gate latch, putty'; '5 anchovies, 2 jam, 1 olives'; 'bread, grapes, milk, dye hair, 4 roses'.

And shopping lists are nothing.
^*
Some people collect the little slips of paper inserted with bought clothes and electronics to confirm quality control: 'This garment has been thoroughly inspected by Inspector No. 44'; 'Inspected by Sandra'; 'We hope you'll enjoy the comfort, wearability and quality of these shoes that I have inspected'—this last note signed simply '3'. In 'The Volcano Collector', Susan Sontag writes of a man known as 'Picture-mad'. 'As a child he collected coins, then automata, then musical instruments. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip of not what is collected but of collecting.'

All this stuff. When I enter my house there is a long wall of London Underground maps on the wall. One wall will not contain them—they have spread onto the opposite wall and up the stairs, the oldest from 1902, twenty-eight framed examples of the perfect lesson in form and function, beautiful in their simplicity and colour. I don't know why I began my collection, but I have pursued it at transport and book fairs and map and Internet auctions, and I have derived the usual thrills of outbidding and being outbid, and narrowing down my wants list from Edward Johnston and MacDonald Gill designs to the first maps of Harry Beck, from the District and Central lines alone to the first unified maps of 1906, from the ones with old stations like Mark Lane and Post Office to the opening of the Jubilee extension to Stratford. Visitors seem to like them when they come to the house, and have used the latest one to get home.

In the sitting-room there is a glass case with Technicolor Corgi and Dinky cars from television shows and movies, and I'd be embarrassed by them if they weren't so attractive and exciting in their original cardboard boxes, if they weren't so complete with their
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Waverly ring,
Avengers
poison-tipped umbrellas, their Batman exhaust missiles and James Bond ejector seats. Besides, there was nothing unusual about these models or the rest of the collection—just the normal Thunderbirds/Joe 90/Captain Scarlet/Yellow Submarine/Saint/Kojak/Monkeemobile spread—and there was nothing there that most other British men in their forties wouldn't also desire.

Upstairs there are the two cases of enamel Chelsea badges, and crates of rare Elvis Costello records, mostly from the late 197os when his singles had different sleeves throughout Europe and the vinyl came with different B-sides and colours. I don't know why I wanted six different copies of 'Less Than Zero' and ten of 'Watching the Detectives', and I never play them and seldom look at them, but I am reassured by
Record Collector
magazine that my eccentricities are not unique (or even rare).

I did not tend to question my collecting habits, I just enjoyed them. I thought that one day I might put everything on display and have my own little museum for the appreciative. But nowadays there is no avoiding the conclusion that my collecting habits are tied up with the death of my father. I became keener as the size of my family declined. Within a few years in my late teens I lost several relatives—grandparents, an aunt, a cousin—and I began to wonder whether stamps were in some way compensating for a family. They are a solace, and a way of restoring order. They may suggest an element of control in a fateful world—everything in its place, just like the old days.

I'm with Sigmund Freud on this. My brief period of not collecting stamps ended not long after my father died, and I was mad about other things as well—Esso coins, old magazines, Tube tickets.
^*
Freud began collecting seriously just after his father died in 1896, but he had been thinking clearly about collecting the year before. Freud collected fertility figures; inevitably, collecting was about sex, or the lack of it. 'When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuffboxes, the former is finding a substitute for her need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for—a multitude of conquests. Every collector is a substitute for a Don Juan Tenerio, and so too is the mountaineer, the sportsman, and such people. These are erotic equivalents.'
^*

But what happens when you flip? I think that most collectors at some point question the purpose of what they're doing. Is collecting futile? What am I trying to prove? Why am I spending all this money on things I don't need?

Certainly the art world has a handle on this. In 2000, the British artist Michael Landy decided he had enough of things, and the way we define ourselves by what we possess, so he destroyed them in an event in Oxford Street called Break Down. Everything he owned went. Two years later the same thing happened in America, when a twenty-nine-year-old man called John Freyer decided he needed some spare money and didn't really need anything he had collected in his life, and so he put everything on eBay. Everything, including sideburns and half-consumed jars of food. He believed, and rightly so, that someone would be collecting even the most absurd thing he had to offer.

When I met Freyer in New York he was promoting a book called
All My Life for Sale.
He had in fact already sold everything, and so all there was left to do was collect the experiences of each sale in a compelling picture book. He hadn't just sold his things, including an answering-machine tape and his two false front teeth (a childhood accident on a golf course), he had also visited the people who had bought them. He had sold a brick to a bidder in London (cost of brick $3, cost of postage $35, but Freyer felt embarrassed and only charged $10), and his sideburns went for $19.50 to a man in Pittsburgh who later reported he was disillusioned with his purchase. I watched Freyer as he set up a slideshow at Makor, a Jewish community centre on the Upper West Side. He was only one participant on a six-person panel. The others were all people who had bought something from Freyer on eBay in the last year. There was a man who had bought a Stevie Wonder LP, a woman who had bought a US army chair, a female rock critic called Mary Huhn who had bought an old Hawaiian instrumental album, and there was Adam Cohen, a reporter on the
New York Times
who had written a book about eBay called
The Perfect Store
and had bought Freyer's fish-print shirt. Cohen said that Freyer now had an imitator in Australia who was selling her life on a site called AMLFS.com (she couldn't use the full allmylifeforsale domain name, because Freyer had already sold it to the University of Iowa Museum of Art for $1,165 after thirty-four bids).

How strange, I thought, as I learnt about the person who had bought his bag of Porky's BBQ Pork Skins. Were people now collecting because they were keen to be part of a consumerist art statement, or just for the madness of it, to build up a lot of one thing no one else cared about? In this way one could become unique, and put down a marker on the earth. But then I realised I had done something similar without knowing it, and I saw that the person who had collected the strangest thing of all was me.