Week 20/21: How to ask questions, Part 2
Revisiting question asking for curation
part 1: the mad collector
To prepare for our first class session of Rare Book Curatorship many weeks ago, we read the (fictional!!!) short story “Minor Watt” by Paul Theoreux, a horror story about a wealthy man, Minor Watt, who has amassed an astonishing collection of precious art. Throughout the story, he turns to destroying these items in front of the people who care most about them: a beautiful vase coveted by his ex-wife smashed at her feet, a priceless bowl thrown into the blender to the horror of a curator, a favorite painting slashed and burned before the very artist’s eyes. Through Watt’s increasingly pointed, personalized methods, “he wiped these rare things from the face of the earth, leaving only a memory in which he mattered.” Watt is no longer satisfied with possessing these materials and knowing everything about them. He desires to occupy the space where they once were. In the story of these things, his violent choices are the period of the last sentence.
Minor Watt personifies the “mad” collector trope. For a two-year stretch, whenever I told people I work with rare books, their eyes widened and they whispered, “Like that guy from YOU?” referring to the Netflix Show starring that guy from Gossip Girl who works as an antiquarian bookseller and also stalks attractive blonde women and then kidnaps and murders them. “No!” I said, “Not like YOU!”
Examples of “mad” collectors abound in popular media: Sherlock often gets short shrift; pretty much any show about a serial killer (Dexter, Hannibal, a lot of Criminal Minds episodes); the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” character Wan Shi Tong (He Who Knows Ten Thousand Things), a meticulous collector of knowledges (and who takes a pretty strong stance against collection access at the end of his episode in Season 2 when he…sinks his entire library into a desert and traps an unfortunate anthropologist in perpetuity). None of these figures bode particularly well in terms of thinking about collecting as a contribution and responsibility: it casts a pallor of irascibility, greediness, and even criminality over the practice and the people who engage with it.
Despite Watt’s growing reputation as an art murderer, he is still allowed to go to auctions, and art dealers still sell to him because they know his inevitable destruction of an item will make the rest of those objects that much scarcer and that much more valuable. The choices of this extreme collector reflect an insidious facet of Western book collecting and heritage collecting writ large: they are tied up with capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, conflating singularity and possession with worth and appreciation. They prioritize immediate gratification over long term cultural health. In the worst (mostly fictional) cases, that pursuit of ultimate possession can escalate to destruction.
Curatorial methods that prioritize wealth and possession have dominated for a long time. I’ve written before about warding clients away from thinking of books as monetary investments that will appreciate steadily over time. These interactions also beg the questions: why would you purchase this book if you’re not interested in keeping it? What does the book mean to you? What do these books mean together? Practicing curation without motivations of control, wealth, and power generates creativity and flexibility.
part 2: the glad collector
These last few issues have been a bit of a bait-and-switch. I outlined the most conservative approaches to collecting by all entities and threw up my hands in false defeat, leaving you with this question: “If book selling and collection are indelibly tied to value, money, and profit, where do we go next?” After discussing Minor Watt in class, we posed an alternative question, a response of sorts, to this conundrum: “What models of collecting can we create that are not based on who has the most wealth, power, and control?”1
My inclination, as evidenced by the brilliant collectors sharing their achievements through the Honey & Wax Prize, the librarians and curators whose work I admire, and the bookdealers who exemplify progressive futures for the field, is that individuals hold a lot of power to turn away from the status quo. They are especially successful in doing so when they work together with other collectors or librarians or dealers to pursue their goals. For each collector interested in high spots, there are many more collectors carving out niches in fan-made materials, neighborhood zines, book-art design, 20th-century science fiction, worn-down books, books with marginalia, books with broken spines, books with lurid covers, and every permutation thereof. Their investment materializes less so in significant funds and more so in time and research. And the cultural wealth of their resulting collections appeals to many institutions, which are increasingly staffed by curators who shift their attention and available funds to the tastes of our generation.
You might ask yourself, how will book dealers ever survive if books’ value are not inherently tied to money? It is still true that books have quantifiable value. In this imagined world, I see the price of a book as reflective of both its cultural significance and the dealer’s labor in describing it and caring for it (which, by the way, is pretty much how things work now except for the wildly inflated high spots that I’ve talked about ad nauseum). To me, the best dealers additionally think about the best locations for the objects they work with, and they work to steward them home. And many dealers understand that there is a hunger for change, compelling them to shift their attentions to meet the market. I’m not arguing that all books should necessarily be free, I’m arguing that our understanding of value should be commensurate with entities besides money. We know this is possible. It’s why many of us keep our grandmother’s china plates.
Another element to consider: Our lecturer defined curation as the selection, description, and interpretation of materials. I would add that curation—of the Latin “curare”—is also care: care of materials in terms of their preservation, use, and cultural significance. Curation is not safeguarding (or gatekeeping, though it often has been), but custodianship of materials through many hands so that they are available for many lives. Curation is the opposite of Minor Watt’s maximalist possession of those art objects. Curation considers how an object contains and is contained by cultural memory—that is, what does it tell us about ourselves, and are we even asking?
These last few issues have been one long preamble to a series of questions that ground me when I work with new materials and that reflect the ideas I’ve detailed for all of you. You can understand this as my curatorial philosophy, a mode of collecting not contingent on who has the most wealth, money, and power:
How will these materials be cared for, both physically and culturally?
Are these materials findable, both in an intuitive home and through documentation?
Do these materials inspire curiosity and invite people into further exploration?
Who controls these materials, and is there an opportunity to relinquish that control to someone new or different?
The short of the long of it is that when I imagine a heritage landscape that does not prioritize wealth, I see us diverging from the genius (or madness) of a single collector and prioritizing how groups of people have cultivated and contributed to collections. Minor Watt can be put to bed.
Housekeeping and Birdseeking
house
Last week I gave a guest lecture on bookselling to a class at Brown, which was loads of fun. Then I visited Brown and saw Heather!! Which was also loads of fun! Being outside in the sun and around other people is a good thing. I forgot how much I missed that.
What I read this week: Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair, For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange, and Sourdough by Robin Sloan
bird
Hello to this peeping bird.
I hope you’re all keeping cool. More later.
I posed this second question about alternative models in my thesis, though paraphrased a bit, and so thinking about this feels like meeting an old friend after a few years (and a pandemic) apart.
Did they reach out to you to lead a class??? That is so cool.