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Why Do We Collect?

© Barbara Nicholson Bell

In something of a departure from the usual articles written for this Topic, I would like to direct your attention to the web site of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, located in Culver City, California. The Museum's reason for existence is explained on the Introduction page of the web site. In short, it harkens back to the early days of "museums" of natural history in 19th century America. The collections housed here are diverse, somewhat unusual, and have been brought together from other, less well-known repositories for a variety of reasons. They don't seem to have much in common, but each is a worthwhile exhibit.

My delight in discovering the web site was in the selection of essays which accompany the exhibit information. I learned a great deal about museums (one of the earliest known in recorded history was in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE and which was subsidized by the state treasury.)

I also learned about the philosophy of "collecting" which, it seems, is an almost genetic need of human beings. Various reasons are put forth in these essays, among them a subconscious fight against the inevitable "end of time" when all living things will cease to exist. Collecting, it seems, is a tool of the unconscious mind that rebels against this concept, which preserves some work of man or oddity of nature in order to validate its existence. I think. I am not sure I understood this clearly - perhaps you'll interpret the essay differently.

Other reasons include a desire to belong to a group - or to stand apart from a group, for that matter. Some collectors hoard that which is valuable as an investment, others wish to educate the general public with a display of the unusual or mundane in a new way.

Noah could be considered the first "collector." P.T. Barnum was one of the most successful, and there are countless others both famous and unknown, whose passion for finding and preserving just about any item you can imagine has given us such disparate examples as the Smithsonian, the Ware Collection of the Harvard Botanical Museum known as the "Glass Flowers", the Cheese Museum in Alkmaar, Netherlands, the tiny Wenham Museum of Dolls and Toys in Massachusetts, the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, and of course, the Louvre.

Ask yourself, in a quiet moment of reflection, why you collect the things that you collect. Why did you decide to add that second piece to your collection, thus beginning the long slippery road to a "collection"? If you understand your passion and can express it, I'd love to have you post in the Discussions so the rest of us can sympathize...er, share, with you.