Collections by Alberta Moraine
	YMCA-MEN, Bowery, New York City, October 2000. Photo courtesy Alberta Moraine.

So my friend and I are walking back from the movie when he stops, excitedly, to tell me he has a paint mixing stick for me to photograph - it is made from burl maple and is not just your ordinary paint stick. In response, I laugh at his enthusiasm for a paint mixing stick, but I also make a mental note to remind him about this, next time I am there with film in my camera. (It could be a good photo-op.) This is the same person who has been promising for some time now to show me the many pieces of wood he has collected from job sites over the years of his career as a building contractor. These pieces of wood, he says, were too strange to be useful on the job, and too cool to throw away. Something in him urged him to hang on to them, and so he did.

That reminds me of the writer I know who says she has never been much of a collector, but when pressed, one day recalled that as a child she collected homonyms - pairs of words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings. She recaptured some of her delight as a grade school student, reading a book about earth science that mentioned a rock called "gneiss." She was not sure if it was going to be pronounced "nice" or "niece" but either way, she calculated, she had another trophy for her collection. Something in her was pleased there would be a sure thing - a bona fide new specimen.

I knew a man, a musician, who lived hand-to-mouth, barely on the grid. He had a social security number, but no bank account, no monthly bills mailed to his residence, frequent changes of residence, no photo album, no phone number. No children, no wife, no property to speak of. He was okay for money if he reached into the pockets of his jeans and found some. If he reached and found none, then he knew he had to get paid soon. But this Mr. Marginal, a singer-songwriter, treasured his guitars, and he collected them, adding another one whenever an influx of cash permitted. Last time I checked, he was up to eight or nine of them, each one a good instrument, with its own sound, its own usefulness. His priorities are not the typical ones, but his drive to accumulate is there, as strongly as for someone stockpiling platinum and diamonds.

I confess to one perverse grouping of my own. I began years ago keeping the diskettes, and then the CDs, that America Online would send in the mail, and bundle with my magazines, and tuck into the Sunday newspaper. There is now a big cardboard box of those garish, overexcited assemblages of glossy-finish cardboard, computer-readable media, and shrinkwrap. According to some, a "collection" can be defined in part by its non-essentialness. In other words, if you need it, you aren't collecting it. By that test, I am a collector of AOL promotional media. The material I gather together for my songwriting would not qualify, since those bits of dialogue, melody, mode, feel, are necessary to the process.

My aunt collected miniature elephants and had two glass-shelved, illuminated, floor-to-ceiling display cases made for her living room to show them to her guests. One of my grandmothers had a drawer in the kitchen she called the "glory hole" where she put the little things she could not categorize except that they were too good to throw out.

Toccoa, Georgia, December 2000. Photo courtesy Alberta Moraine.

A dear friend photographs old brick and cement walls with advertisements and signs painted on them, nearly faded away. (I have wondered for years if there would come a time to use the word "palimpsest" in a sentence, and I think this is it.) He collects the photographic images, trapping a moment in the lives of the gradually disappearing hand-painted letters and pictures, and inspiring the photos you see here.

Read, NYC, November 2000. Photo courtesy Alberta Moraine.

My cousin collects blue-and-white porcelain from China. In addition to plates, urns, garden stools, bowls and spoons, she has a blue-and-white ceramic box shaped like a crouching rabbit. Another relative collected stamps for years, but according to organizing principles perhaps a tad unusual - he collected and catalogued these stamps by their visual subject matter. I am the lucky beneficiary of one of these notebooks of collected stamps - this one, of fish. There are treasures on every page. [Some are excerpted throughout the Newsletter. Ed.]

The fish notebook begins with pages of stamps from the nations of the world. Some stamps are covered with the ink from post office cancellations, and others seem to be in mint condition, probably bought at one of those stamp-collectors shows they put on in hotels near the airports. After a review of fish by nationality, the notebook begins again with sea life arranged by name. I love the careful hand script identifying the type of creature, and often the year the stamp was issued. In one charming grouping, hermit crabs appear on stamps from Cuba, Australia, and Singapore - the crabs look quite similar but their choices of hiding place, style of backdrop, and color schemes differ.

Hermit crab stamps from the Moraine Family collection.

I thought this stamp-collector story was a pretty good story, that is until I got trumped the other night. I heard about the father of a friend of mine, who was a surgeon as well as a stamp collector. He would accumulate many of the same exact stamp. Then he would pile them up in a perfect even-sided stack and tie the bundle - or should we say suture it - never to be disturbed again. Now that's stamp-collecting!

Two examples from the Moraine Family	jellyfish stamp collection.

Alternatively, Stamp Doctor would take one of those special stamp-collector notebook pages made of creamy-colored smooth thin cardboard, pleated into parallel shallow rows running across the width of the page. Every row makes room for a number of stamps, each held fast by friction at the bottom edge of the pleat, yet with room for most of the stamp to peek out at the top. So this collector's other odd stamp-accumulation method was to take, again, a lot of the same stamp and array them in one of those pleated rows, but so close together that you'd see one stamp at the right-hand edge, and nothing but layers of margin all the way to the left-hand edge. I imagine it looked like an animation of a single stamp, accelerating through space.

I know of collectors of celebrities’ signatures, of Nineteenth-Century baseball cards, of the glass insulators from old telephone poles, of marbles, of heirloom potato varieties, of tramp art, of old broken watches, of weights and scales, of knives, of farm implements, of windowshade pulls, of tourist postcards from Hawaii, of Wegee photographs from the nighttime New York City streets of the 1940’s, of cylinder recordings of Southern bluesmen, of dhurries from the prisons of the Raj, of gapped-pentatonic folk songs from around the world (they occur in all the modes except Locrian, by the way).

As I look over these paragraphs I realize I’ve been collecting interesting people for quite some time. Or they have collected me. Doesn’t much matter, I guess. Here we are.

About the Author:

Alberta Moraine is a frequent contributor to the Newsletter. For an index of her previous articles, find it in the Newsletter Archives at http://www.arts4all.com/newsletter/findit.asp#author

Tuna, Costa Rica 1937.

Resources:

You probably are now, or know someone who is, or has been, a collector. See if you are collecting them, or vice versa.

An online exhibition from the Wegee Archive at the International Center for Photography is available at http://www.icp.org/weegee/index.html