THE ART OF COLLECTING

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXIII, Issue 17690, 2 July 1927, Page 14

THE ART OF COLLECTING

ACCUMULATING THE USELESS. “MY OLD PLUS-FOURS.” (By Robert Magill). Apart from a distressing tendency to grumble at the Government and a desire to borrow money, the habit of collecting things is about all that distinguishes man from the other, and more rational, animals. By collecting things I do not mean .debts or anything useful.. A bird will gather small pieces of rag, but not so that he can classify them and label them and make other birds jealous of their possession. He wants them to help him solve the housing problem by incorporating them in a nest. Likewise a dog will collect bones, and, just as we prefer old china, so he likes them to be of early date, but not because he regards anything antique as sacred. It’s because they have more flavour. The desire to accumulate something which somebody else _ hasn’t got appears in the human animal at a very early age. I started by collecting childish ailments. .1 had all the ordinary ones, and I did my course of measles, croup and whooping cough all lat once, and they tell me that to whoop with croup sounds like a charabanc robbed of its young. There are people who go through life with nothing to talk about but their illnesses, but the trouble is that you can’t put them in a glass cabinet where people can’t examine them too closely to see if they’re genuine. Boyhood’s Treasures. Later, I remember, I collected pieces of string, small stones, tram tickets, marbles, handles of knives with no blades to them, pencils with no lead in them, keys that wouldn’t open anything and about seven pounds of similar miscellaneous In course of time, like all small boys, I took up philately. Not current issues, obviously. I couldn’t afford the time to wait to be served with them at the post office. These were used stamps, and my schoolmaster, who was himself an ardest stamp collector, used to try to persuade me that it wad a profitable hobby because it taught one so much. He may have been right. I learnt that kings never wore collars, and that German birds always had two heads, also that the chief exports of Mauritius were the penny and two-penny post office issues, of which there are only twenty-three specimens, worth about £2OOO each. I got over that. I still collect stamps—on cheques, and receipted bills. But I no longer get the thrill I once got when I swapped a white mouse with suspected mange for a three-cornered Cape of Good Hope. Besides, when you are married, a wife can look at the things you cherished in your bachelor days and make you feel like a dog that has been raking over the dustbin. The true collector, however, never marries, unless, of course, he collects wives, like Henry VIII. In most cases, apart from a vacant look in his eye when you are talkiug about politics, he appears more or less sane in a crowd. The Ardent Collector. It isn’t until he has shut his front door behind him and is alone with his cigarette pictures, or his Louis flatirons that he begins to exist; then his eyes will light up and he will take a chipped saucer off the wall that a cat woq,ld refuse to drink from, and he will tell you with bated breath that it is early Whitechapel. He will describe how he got it. Maybe there were an Italian count and an American millionaire after it too; the count put the Mafia on him, and the millionaire tried to lure him out to Chicago, where he would die a natural death through a pistol shot.

On the other hand, if he can explain how he bought it for twopence on a stall in the Lower Marsh he will be still prouder. You can collect many things, but they must have this one attribute. They must he perfectly useless. A year or so ago people were paying cynical curio dealers about half-a-crown an ounce for those horrible coloured glass paperweights our grandfathers brought home from Margate. There followed a mania for potlids, so they were raked out of the sculleries and attics where we had thrown them, sold at five guiqeas each, and displayed in ornate china cabinets. Luckily these things were small, and broke fairly easily if you dropped them. I dread to think what will happen when the railways become obsolete. I'm certain that there will be a craze for old railway engines. The charm of antique furniture has probably persisted the longest, and some of it has a sort of beauty of its own. But it is a beautv that suited its own age. I don’t like to see a man in lavender spatls and striped trousers sitting on a Jacobean chair. Age Out of Place. If he must sit on one of those fragile things' with the - cane back and the twisted legs, he ought to be consistent, and dress as a Cavalier, with a sword. He is as much of an anachronism as it would be to write letters nowadays on a brick. And the genuine furniture addict i 3 so illogical. Show him a chair with a weak back, bent legs, partly disintegrated with age, and he will pray ;for it. But introduce him to a lady with the same characteristics, and he will try to bite her. Age in a museum, where it has an educational value, is all very well, but it’s out of place in a modern flat.

Then we have porcelain. I’ve known a man to empty his tea into his lap so that he could look at the potter’s mark on the bottom of his cup. He was a great authority on the subject, and he said it was early Staffordshire, about 110. I bought it at a sixpenny store for threepence, and I suggested that we should go into partnership, buy a tew gross, and make some money, bu'f, he lost interest. These experts can look at the illegible marking on the bottom of a. vase and tell you its age, where it was made and its value to a penny. I’m not an expert. All I know is that if the mark looks too much like the one you see in the text-books it’s probably a forgery. Chippendale’s Busy Days. And just as we treasure old suitsof armour, they will arrange my. old plus-fours round a dummy, with a brassey in its hand, and say how romantic and beautiful I must have been to wear them. The gramophone I gave my. little daughter—because my wife hated its tin red horn and made me buy a mahogany cabinet affair that doesn’t sound too well —will eventually end up in a very fashionable drawingroom as a veritable antique, just as

a friend of mine—a retired grocerkeeps an old spinet. And the good work goes on, but it is becoming very difficult to get hold of' the usual rubbish, and besides, if Chippendale had . had to make all the genuine Chippendale turniture we hafre he would still have been working. There are also too many antique, dealers with wives and children who want fur coats and an expensive education. Meanwhile, I am collecting engravings. They are not old, ' and they are all of the same place—the Houses of Parliament. They are not signed by Morland or Bartolozzi, but by Sir .Warren Fisher. And when I get enough—but I expect (he rate-collector will collect them ; in the end.-as usual. .