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Inspiration - white space, small images, layering

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Inspiration - with each click new image appears onscreen

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White #FFFFFF

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The subject matter is a photo of the Florence Duomo. The element of change is Function.

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13 column grid

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From stickers and newspaper clippings, to coins and memorabilia my childhood was filled with time spent collecting. The things we collect can represent phases, growth and act as a time capsule. It can be a labour of love, or merely a convenience. The aim is to create a publication about collecting in many forms and for many reasons; from monetary to sentimental value.

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Object to represent publication.

A jar filled with the contents collected in the bottom of my backpack and handbag.

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SIBI

[M] you have to shoot a video between 12am and 4am that features nothing but over sixty years old characters and that takes place in a bathroom. [A] your work has to be about movement and about personal. [T] the title of the work has to feature :

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Crawford Doyle Bookstore

Eric Holzenberg photographed at Grolier Book Club

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Candide by Voltaire

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THE RAREFIED WORLD OF RARE BOOK COLLECTING IS NOT A DYING ART

In this age of Kindle and Nook, when used book stores are rapidly disappearing and real estate is at a record premium, one might assume that the world of rare book collecting should be declining as cemetery plots fill up. But in reality, a rich field of rabid book collectors remains.

“It’s not just old farts,” said John King, a used and rare bookseller in Detroit. “One generation passes on while another emerges and starts collecting. My business hasn’t dipped.” Rare and antiquarian books is a broad category, encompassing manuscripts, medieval handwritten pages that were bound at some later time and the first printed books to first editions of classic fiction and nonfiction, and even some contemporary publications.

The first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, appeared in England in 1997 in an edition of only 500 copies, said Richard Austin, head of the books and manuscripts department at Sotheby’s (it was published the next year in the United States as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). “The print run was small, because no one knew it was going to be the sensation it turned into. In good condition, one of those early copies would sell for $30,000–$40,000.”

There is a canon of books that is most sought after by the most serious book collectors. These are the volumes listed in a publication based on a 1963 British exhibition titled Printing and the Mind of Man, which identifies 424 books, starting with the Gutenberg Bible and ending with a compilation of Winston Churchill speeches, that are said to have influenced Western civilization. (It includes writings predating Gutenberg, such as those by Aristotle, Dante, Homer and Plato, which were published in book form later.) Among the books that made the cut are Aesop’s Fables, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Voltaire’s Candide, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Thomas More’s Utopia and Cicero’s Discourse on Old Age.

The exhibition catalogue and a subsequent 1983 printing have themselves become collectible books, available on Amazon and from rare book dealers. “PMM books, as they are called, have an exalted status,” said Tom Lecky, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s. “We make special note when we obtain one of those consignments.”

The PMM is a male club, to be sure—the canon at its most hierarchical and traditional. The only reference to women authors is with reference to males who are included. So, Jane Austen’s dedicating her novel Emma to Sir Walter Scott is noted in his inclusion for Waverley, the first of 40 or so of the Waverley novels he published starting in 1814. Waverley, we read, “has become the progenitor of the historical novel throughout the world,” while Austin’s book might only be notable for still being known to this day. George Eliot turns up, not for her own work, but as translator of David Friedrich Strauss’ 1835 Jesus without the Myths from German into English in 1840.

Okay, so we all knew the canon was formed at a less politically correct time. Hitler’s Mein Kampf made the cut in 1925, the same year as Einstein’s New Theory of Gravitation, which was also included. Plenty of scientists (Copernicus, Fermi, Galileo, Planck, Rontgen), world leaders (Woodrow Wilson for his 1918 Fourteen Points and Lenin for his 1902 What is to Be Done?), ancients, Renaissance men (Machiavelli, Vasari) and more modern types (Darwin, Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Le Corbusier, Marinetti, Schoenberg) all receive recognition for their history-changing published writing. Chaucer isn’t included (although the Chaucer Society is); nor is Boccaccio, but Shakespeare, Goethe and Coleridge are. Jeremy Bentham (Utilitarianism), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract), Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) and Oswald Spengler (The Twilight of the West) offer their prescriptions for the world, as does our nation’s Declaration of Independence.

Richard Austin said that among the most prized PMM books are original edition (with original bindings) copies of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species ($100,000-plus), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ($100,000­–$120,000) and “first folios” of Shakespeare (“multiple millions”). Both he and Mr. Lecky noted that some buyers, such as doctors and scientists, may collect in their professional fields, although other buyers pursue their own interests, such as the first voyages around the world (Sir Walter Raleigh’s writings) or they just may want to own a book by Copernicus even if they don’t know a word of Latin.

Of course, inclusion in PMM does guarantee the highest sale prices. Among the volumes at the highest price points of the rare book market not listed, are an unbound compilation of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci (Codex Leicester), which was purchased by Bill Gates at Christie’s in 1994 for $30.8 million, and a four-volume 1827-38 Birds of America by John James Audubon that sold at Sotheby’s London in 2010 for $11.5 million (£7.9). The Gutenberg Bible is in the PMM canon (a 1450s Gutenberg Bible sold at Christie’s in 1987 for $5.39 million), but failure to be included has not dimmed interest in James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses (a copy sold at Christie’s for $460,500 in October 2002).

More recent books have become classics and collectors items outside of PMM recognition, as well. A first edition of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye reached a high of $23,750 at Sotheby’s in 2014, which is still quite a bit less than the $156,500 paid at Sotheby’s in 1999 for 14 letters that the author sent to his much younger lover Joyce Maynard back in the early 1970s. Even newer published material has sold well that has shown up at book fairs, such as flyers and newsletters from the Arab Spring of just a few years ago and self-published magazines of the punk rock offshoot Queercore, and other “ephemeral items like that,” according to Susan Benne, executive director of the Manhattan-based Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. It may not be antiquarian yet, but this material is rare (although it sells at lower prices than some other, older items).

“Typically, rare book buyers tend to be middle-aged or older readers,” said John Doyle, president of New York City’s Crawford Doyle Booksellers, which sells new, out-of-print and rare volumes and is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. “They are reminiscing about books that impressed them as children.”

Are rare book collectors actually readers of the books they buy? Rebecca Romney, manager of Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia, said, “People who buy rare books are not buying them to read them. They are buying them as a sort of emblem.”

Not everyone fits that description. Cynthia Griggs Fleming, a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who collects books on both Detroit’s automotive history (“I love cars and am particularly fond of Buicks”) and the city’s African-American population, said, “It is a crime to sit a book on a shelf and not read it. A book isn’t a museum piece. There is wisdom in the pages.” Gerald Kaminsky, an estate attorney in Detroit who has amassed a collection of books about American presidents, said that “I collect what I like to read, and I do read what I collect.”

Quite a few brick-and-mortar sellers of rare books expressed concerns about the Internet, of course. “On eBay, you can develop an entire collection in one day,” said Steven Clark, a real estate developer in Livonia, Michigan, and a collector of old maps and science books from the 18th century. (His collecting also includes 10 strands of Abraham Lincoln’s hair and “a rock from a pond where Lincoln almost drowned as a boy.”) “I’ll go to a bookseller when I can’t find something another way.”

But perhaps surprisingly, technology hasn’t sounded the death knell for book collecting, Mr. Lecky said, noting that Christie’s four to eight annual sales have remained consistent over the past five or 10 years ($45.2 million worldwide in 2014, $30 million in 2013, $47.5 million in 2012, $20.28 million in 2011 and $24.78 million in 2010). Sotheby’s also has reported a consistent level of international sales over the years: $77 million in 2014, $82 million in 2013, $70 million in 2012, $62 million in 2011. The ups and downs between one year and the next reflect notable consignments more than greater or lesser interest in this collecting category, according to spokespersons for both auction houses, although it may be true that growing scarcity is raising prices for certain sought-after volumes and not a growth in prospective buyers.

Technology may, in fact, encourage rare book collecting, as buyers are able to locate and acquire sought-after books online more quickly and efficiently than if they browsed one place after another. “I’ve put together two or three collections that I wouldn’t have been able to assemble as comprehensively and in such a short period of time without the Internet,” said Eric Holzenberg, a collector of books on architecture and the decorative arts, as well as director of New York City-based The Grolier Club.

The challenge for the field of book collecting is that it may seem like an early generation’s pastime. The Grolier Club “tends to be an older organization” in terms of the age of its members, Mr. Holzenberg said. “It helps to be retired and have extra money.”

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This collection of 1970s bric-a-brac came from the home of stylist Kristin Lane. Photo: Jim Golden

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COLLECTING IS NOT HOARDING: HOARDING DSM-5 CRITERIA

Criterion #1: Difficulty Discarding and Value of Objects Collectors seem more flexible in the way they establish and hold onto their valuables than do hoarders. they may begin collecting one type of book as children, for example, and as they mature, switch to different types of books (e.g. action books as children to mystery books as adults). Collecting seems to go through its own natural life cycle with perhaps as many as 70% of children having some type of collection but only 23% of those in their 20s.  By the age of 60, only 13-15% of the population is estimated to have a collection. The only hitch in this line of thinking is that people may be less likely to collect new items as they get older, but they may find it very difficult to part with their possessions.

Collectors also trade or sell all or parts of their collection without experiencing the mental anguish of a hoarder. It’s not clear how many collectors actually do sell or reduce their collections over time, but the more likely they are to do so, the less likely it is that are true hoarders.  

Regarding the value of their collection, hoarding is defined as difficulty parting with items regardless of their value. Hoarders may collect truly valuable items, but they may also collect – quite literally—garbage. Collectors may also collect items of little intrinsic value such as mass produced toys that only gain worth because they are no longer available (think vintage Barbie dolls or Happy Meals from the 1980s).  Because it’s not possible to define “valuable,” then, the important criterion seems to be that the individual has trouble parting with objects regardless of their actual value.

Overall, the study’s authors believe that some collectors may actually fulfill this first criterion for hoarding, especially if they become distressed not just at discarding, but at the prospect of discarding their collections. Without pathologizing the average hobbyist or Antiques Road Show fan, it seems safe to conclude that the continuum from collecting to hoarding seems to slant more toward hoarding when this criterion of difficulty discarding objects regardless of their value comes into play. For now, you can hold onto your vintage collection of Lionel trains.

Criterion #2: Strong Urges to Keep and Distress at Throwing Out As much as they may prize their collections, people who are more collector than hoarder don’t seem to express worry at the loss of their items or even a strong urge to keep them. Taking into account the factor of what they want done with their collections after they’ve died might be one way of defining distress over giving up a collection, and there is some evidence on this. In one study, as many as 90% of adults 65 and older stated that they would pass their collections down to their inheritors, or have the objects sold or donated. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of such a collection, you may recall dispensing of the entire set without more than moment’s hesitation and with a good deal of relief. Again, this speaks to the fact that a collection may not be all that inherently valuable to anyone but the collector. The authors concluded that there’s no real way to know from the literature whether putting a collection in your will is the same as showing pathological distress over giving it up while you're alive.  However, if collectors specify what’s supposed to happen to the collection in their will, there’s a chance that this reflects attachment that begins to border on hoarding.

Criterion #3: Accumulation and Clutter A survey of the number of possessions that collectors typically have showed that over half keep fewer than 50 objects in their collections, but 28% had 100 or more. The largest collectors were men in the age range of 18-25 years old. Although this doesn’t seem like a huge percent, Nordsletten and Mataix-Cols pointed out that in order to display these collections, it’s often necessary for collectors to take up a significant amount of their living space. One collector, they noted, had only 10 objects in his collection, but they were tractors.

Despite the invasion of their living space by their collections, non-hoarders show one important difference from their hoarding counterparts. This is that collectors do put their possessions on display rather than letting them accumulate all over homes or apartments. Hoarders may have homes so cluttered with their possessions that they can hardly move. In addition, the hoarded items (which may range from moldy food to ancient newspapers) are strewn around and not put in any sort of displayable order as would a collection. Not all collectors have nice and tidy arrays of their prized objects, but they are much more likely to do so than are people with the disorder of hoarding.

Criterion #4: Clinically Significant Distress or Impairment As is true for all conditions evaluated in the DSM, hoarding must fulfill the criterion of causing significant distress in a person’s daily life.  This means that hoarders have difficulty holding onto their jobs, maintaining normal family ties, and residing within the community.  The distress they experience also translates into feelings of shame or regret and they wish they could stop their hoarding (i.e. “ego dystonic”).

Unlike hoarders, average collectors have strong family relationships, interact in a social context with other collectors, and don’t experience guilt or regret. They participate in an active community of collectors, developing friendships within the community, and may even share their interests with family members.

Overall Conclusions In examining the overlap between hoarding and collecting, Nordsletten and Mataix-Cols conclude that, at worst, a collector may fit Criteria #1 and #2 (as well as having other medical or mental illnesses). However, the average collector does not meet Criteria #3 or #4.  The average collector also does not show patterns of excessive acquisition or lack of insight into their condition, behaviors that are evaluated during a DSM assessment.

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FOUR SIGNS THAT YOU’RE AN EXTREME COLLECTOR

Hoarding comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Most people collect something. Some stuff their closets with super 3-for-1 deals from discount clothing stores. Others pack their kitchen cabinets with great bargains they got using grocery store coupons. Some people's medicine chests may be overflowing with free samples of everything from bandaids to face creams. Many people collect objects having seemingly little value to anyone but themselves, from used concert or movie tickets to the books and toys they loved as children.  You may think nothing of these behaviors until you decide it’s time to straighten out your stash. Then you find it surprisingly difficult to throw out those cherished memorabilia or those sale clothes you never ended up wearing.

For the majority of people, these forms of collecting don’t really interfere with their ability to function in everyday life.  You may joke with your friends that you “hoard” souvenir pencils, but your hobby very likely does not qualify you for the disorder of hoarding. According to British researchers Ashley Nordsletten and Mataix-Cols (2012), up to one-third of adults engage in some form of collecting. In contrast, 2–5% of the adult population would meet the criteria for a diagnosis of hoarding.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published by the American Psychiatric Association is currently being revised and will be called DSM-5 when it is published in 2013.  There will be 6 criteria for what they will call Hoarding Disorder, two of which rule out symptoms due to other conditions (a medical illness or obsessions in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). Like other disorders in the DSM, a third criterion mandates that the hoarding must cause clinically significant distress or pose a threat to the person’s health or the health of others. In the case of hoarding, this means that the individual experiences the hoarding as what is called "ego dystonic," meaning that the hoarder finds the behavior disturbing even while he or she feels unable to stop it. Hoarding disorder will be a new category in DSM-5 because, as the authors explain, this will "increase public awareness, improve identification of cases, and stimulate both research and the development of specific treatments for Hoarding Disorder." Although hoarding used to be a subcategory of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), it would now be a stand-alone disorder, because the DSM-5 authors believe it often occurs in the absence of OCD.

The new criteria for hoarding disorder to be included in DSM-5, then, will include:

Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with personal possessions, regardless of their actual value.

This difficulty is due to strong urges to save items and/or distress associated with discarding them.

The symptoms lead to extreme cluttering of the home or workplace that renders them unliveable or unusable. 

The individual experiences clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning which may include maintaining a safe home or work environment.

The hoarding is not attributable to another medical condition such as dementia.

The hoarding is not attributable to another psychological disorder such a major depressive disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

At the risk of defining a normal behavior as abnormal, though, it’s important to be aware that there may be a subgroup of “Extreme Collectors” who meet all the criteria of hoarding but have not been diagnosed. These avid collectors may go undetected among the collecting population because they seem to be engaging in the same behaviors as the average collector. The key differences between them and average collectors seem to rest in Criteria #3 and 4. 

Extreme collectors often become involved in more than one type of collecting behavior. Their living spaces become increasingly overrun by their objects. Although unlike hoarders, their collections are orderly, if they become large enough (or their home is too small), they do live among clutter. Extreme collectors may also invest a considerable amount of money and effort in their collecting behavior, which can begin to have negative effects on their jobs and family lives. They may also begin to feel guilty and become socially isolated as they disappear more and more into their collections. Some of these individuals may have another psychological disorder or a medical condition (such as dementia) that leads to or exacerbates their symptoms. They don’t take pleasure in collecting, and aren’t part of the community of collectors that can often develop among average collectors.

Just because you enjoy collecting, and may even have a few stashes around your home or office of objects that mean more to you than they do to others, this should not be a cause for alarm. However, when you, or someone you know, starts to show those extreme collecting signs (#3 and #4), it may be time to seek help. Fortunately, even cases of severe hoarding respond to psychotherapy, particularly cognitive-behavioral therapy geared specifically to this condition.  Check out the two resources at the bottom of this post, which will also lead you to other helpful links.

At the opposite extreme, don’t rush to conclude that because you or a loved one has one (or more) collections, it means a diagnosis of hoarding disorder is in order. All psychiatric diagnoses must meet rigorous criteria before they are applied. As long as you enjoy your hobby, don’t let it run your life, modify your collecting preferences over time, and are able to share your interests with others (including family), there is every reason to keep it a vital part of your life for years to come.

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Rae and her wolf collection, Emily Blincoe.

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EMILY BLINCOE: RAE AND HER WOLF COLLECTION

This is Rae and her wolf collection. This is part of my ongoing series, The Collection Collection, where I take a portrait of folks with their collection of treasures. I hope to shoot many, many more of these so if you know someone with a fine collection, please let me know. I would love to travel to meet you, too. Rae had so many wolves there was no possible way I could fit them all into one photograph. My favorite part (besides her rings) was her hand painted wolf toilet seat in her bathroom. Her son painted and installed it for her. Rae started collecting southwestern themed items but it quickly escalated and she had to narrow it down to just wolves after a while. Stuffed animals, wind chimes, an almost full-sized cast iron wolf placed carefully into a dog bed, paintings and wall hangings, pillows and rugs… You name it.   It was quite impressive!  I had the best time hanging out with Rae and her family on Friday. Thank you guys for having me over and letting me take these photographs. I will treasure them. xo Emily

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Emily Blincoe

Found washed up on the shores along the beach.

Beach combing.

My last image from this series of items collected from the beach in Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico.  I don't have all the answers but this trip has certainly opened my eyes and will ignite some change on my part.