Academic Archive Volume IX: The Future of Collecting
by Joe Allen
Maybe, I thought, maybe Deemer’s mad collecting is just that, and that only, a
calling up of ghosts from a million ancestral pasts.
Robert Kroetsch – Alibi1
I dunno . . . I guess I got this way from listening to old records too much . . . these
echoes of the past . . . a lost world, true enough . . . the loss of these rich and
ancient musical traditions . . . Well, it breaks my fuckin’ heart!!
R. Crumb – “Where Has It Gone, All the Beautiful Music of our Grandparents”2
Several years ago, I was flipping through vinyl in a record shop in Michigan. The owner,
whose long grey hair revealed his fondness for the 1960s, had amassed a fairly respectable
collection of rock records with the requisite few short rows of jazz, soul, blues, dollar bins, and
other oddities. We spoke about the unquenchable desire to find and possess rare records. Without
much prodding, he wondered why we persist with such an endless undertaking, spending so
much energy collecting material possessions in this world when we can’t take them to the next.
“When I die, I’ll still be holding a stack of my records as the coffin closes,” he laughed. I didn’t
know quite what to make of such a morbid thought at the time, so I paid for my records, walked
outside into the bright sunlight, and started wondering about the ultimate fate of record
collections.
In “Collecting and Collage-making,” Roger Cardinal tells a related story of a friend who
envisions a tragic end to his work as a used book collector:
While some collectors fret over the integrity of their collection and negotiate
bequests to spare it from decay and dispersal, my friend acknowledges that his
sort of collection is doomed. Once he is gone, he knows that nobody else is likely
to keep his shabby shelves intact. He and his collection are in a sense inseparable;
without his presence, those uneven rows of paperbacks might not even be
perceived as a collection.3
The very essence of a collection is centered in the relationship, usually forged in solitude,
between the collector and the collection. Yet, when we collect, we engage in an activity that has
long been a part of material cultures, one that necessarily explores the world around us and at the
same time engages in a concerted effort to preserve elements of it. To what end, then? The last
500 years of collecting provide a detailed map of possibilities.
The esoteric collectors of the European Renaissance practiced a kind random collecting;
they accumulated what Philip Blom, in To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors
and Collecting, describes as the “strange and incomprehensible.”4 The noblemen often stored
their worldly oddities in a vast but disorderly array of cabinets away from the public eye. While
the princes networked across the globe in search of exotics, they also inadvertently spread the
desire to collect. Blom asserts that in the 1500s “collecting became popular among people who
had neither great means nor great scholarly ambitions.” Ordinary people could collect all kinds
of objects accumulated from the burgeoning seafaring commerce and travel to distant lands. The
artifacts could then be displayed in their own homes. This democratization of collecting is the
first major shift in the history of collectors. The next change took place during the Enlightenment
– systematic and specialized collecting with rational classifications and cataloging replaced
haphazardness.
Even the largest record collection is a mere fraction of all the records ever recorded;
therefore, any collection imposes an order on the sprawling world of vinyl. The collector creates
this order in many ways. Perhaps one of every title from the entire Strata East catalog has been
removed from circulation in the marketplace or maybe it is an original pressing of every record
Pete Rock has ever sampled that has been detected, recovered, and then housed in one collection.
Even if it is just records a listener enjoys, the collected objects take on another value when
placed together in the collector’s domain.
Renowned collector Robert Opie considers himself more of a curator than collector. A
significant portion of Opie’s collection of household cartons and containers was first displayed in
the Museum of Packaging and Advertising located in Gloucester, England from 1985-2001.
During that time, Opie added even more ephemeral pieces of our consumer culture: postcards,
toys, comics, souvenirs, and countless other usually discarded fragments of daily life. Now
500,000 pieces are on display at the Opie's Museum of Memories exhibit at the Wigan Pier
Experience in Wigan, England. He says:
The point of collecting things is not just to concentrate on objects but to
understand how things have evolved in the historical context in which you are
collecting . The way I see it, collecting is like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle
with millions of pieces. . . . The philosophy is: everything is connected with
everything else.5
The way hip hop records speak of other records displays a material intertextuality similar to
Opie’s collection and presentation of consumer packaging. Material objects have a cultural,
historical, and social significance, often established by collectors and curators who place objects
in the context of related objects. According to Phillip Blom, “The collector . . . seeks to convince
himself that there is structure, that things can be ordered and understood.”6 Consider all the
countless ways we organize our record collections: by artist, by genre, by breaks, by samples, by
session musician, by label, by era, by locale, by rarity, by BPMs, and maybe even by the
alphabet. Systematically organizing and cataloging an array of objects often constitutes the basis
of a collection. No matter what set of groupings employed, we have each created a structured
system, a personal archive, a record collection and all that it entails. Cultural theorist Walter
Benjamin defined the crucial aspect of a collection in his massive Arcades Project:
It is the grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s
mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressively devised
historical system: the collection. And for the true collectors, every single thing in
this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the
landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes.7
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Old Deemer is in one of his warehouses. . . . He is looking and looking. Prowling
and poking. Counting or cursing or crying his way, or maybe calling, who knows,
fussing his way through boxes and crates, through cupboards and cases. . . . He
with all that collection of collections that he bothers to show no one.
Robert Kroetsch – Alibi
Secrecy has long been debated as part of the aesthetics of DJing and record collecting.
Afrika Bambaataa, though, shared his break records with Lenny Roberts for the Ultimate Breaks
and Beats series, so hip hop could spread across the globe. Bambaataa and Opie’s desire to share
their collections represents the definitive transition in collecting. Also during the Enlightenment,
royal collectors slowly began letting the public see their collections. Displaying a collection in
what would become museums codified the meaning and significance of the collection.
Presenting a collection in the public sphere re-imagined the role of the collector as a cultural
conservationist, preserving objects for the present and future. For records, I am not counting on
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or any of the major record labels to establish a national archive of
funk records. Most public libraries have long since dumped cumbersome record collections. The
best collections are in private, individual collections.
With each passing year, it gets tougher and more expensive to collect original pressings
of the most desirable records. Imagining the state of record collecting and our personal record
collections even one or two generations from now is difficult to fathom. Robert Opie wonders,
“How interesting is something going to be in ten years’ time, in fifty years’ time, or now? But
having said that, you almost have to save everything, because you don’t actually know what is
going to be interesting . . .”8 As the scarcity of records dramatically increases, in the next century
record collecting will be an undertaking practiced by an elite class, reminiscent of the princes
and noblemen of the Renaissance, if the best collections remain in private hands. Deeding an
invaluable record collection to someone who will act as its curator is certainly a worthwhile
option. Still, in future generations, a fine collection has a great risk of being dispersed, and such
dispersal contradicts one of the central impulses of the collector – the desire the create
permanence. Benjamin contends, “Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who
collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.”9
We generally consider records to be a private resource. Legal scholar Larry Lessig
suggests common sense tells us that “progress always comes from dividing resources among
private owners.”10 Yet when looking forward, should access to record collections remain
nonexistent because of private ownership or should record collections be considered a public
resource? Establishing national, regional, or even local archives of records would firmly
establish the cultural significance of beat digging. Because of record collecting, DJing, and
sampling, innumerable records have been rescued from oblivion by their recovery, reuse, and
recontextualization. “To renew the old world–that is the collector’s deepest desire,” maintains
Benjamin.11 Why should these records be relegated to oblivion once again, this time, though,
irrevocably?
In 1971, Bob Pinson sold roughly 15,000 pieces of his record collection to the, at the
time, recently launched Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center located in the
County Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, TN. He was soon hired as curator, ultimately growing
the institution’s collection to over 200,000 sound recording, cylinders to CDs, before he retired
in 1999 (sadly, he passed away in 2003). Interestingly, the library states, “While we offer
duplication services for research purposes, we do not duplicate recordings for personal use for
fans or collectors.” The museum has also collected everything else connected to country music,
including books, periodicals, photographs, fan club newsletters, scrapbooks, sheet music,
songbooks, video and film, radio transcriptions, and oral histories.12 Such a monumental project
might be a generation away for the culture of beat digging.
Record lists already play a crucial role in collecting and augment the desire to achieve a
sense of completeness. Collecting for hip hop DJs has been both documented and guided by the
club playlists in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, David Toop’s “Lightning Swords of Death”
from each edition of Rap Attack, the Cut ‘n’ Paste Cutography published in Grand Slam
magazine, the four and five star singles in Freddy Fresh’s The Rap Records, Soulman’s Beats to
Catch lists, the sample lists both online and in print, and our individual want lists. According to
Blom “Without [a collector’s] catalogue, every major collector has to fear the dispersal of his
collection and his own descent into obscurity. A catalogue is not an appendage to a large
collection, it is its apogee . . . a catalogue will in one way guarantee the survival of the collection
as ensemble, as organism and as personality.”13I surveyed several collectors who generally
agreed that there is little time to a catalog an entire collection. Since the records are still often in
use, either through DJing or sampling, and the collection itself in a state of constant flux because
buying, selling, and trading keeping them reasonably organized is enough of a challenge. Two
web sites have started the cataloging for the Midwest, Indiana45s (http://www.indiana45s.com/)
and Ohio Soul Recordings (http://www.ohiosoulrecordings.com/). Since 1988, Peter
Wermelinger’s various editions of his funk catalog, the Funky and Groovy Music Records
Lexicon, have also well-served the collector community (http://www.funk.ch/funk-lexikon.htm).
Hopefully, these catalogs will inspire others and ultimately grow into archives of the actual
records and music as well. In an article about Captain John Cook’s Pacific voyages in the late
1700s, Nicholas Thomas compares museums and individual collectors, “While the museum is
associated with the public and the state, and with the condition of permanence, collecting –
which provides its contents – is usually understood as a private and impassioned pursuit.”14 By
establishing and formalizing an outlet or destination for a life of record collecting, private
collections will be shifted into the public sphere, and, most importantly, assuring public access
will allow a collection to endure well past our individual lifetimes.
. . . he’s managed to collect a trace of the discarded world into his warehouse . . . the
collection itself only confirms the discontinuity of this world; it’s my talk that puts it
together. I rave the world into coherence for Deemer.
Robert Kroetsch – Alibi
Notes
1. Canadian author Robert Kroetsch’s novel Alibi tells the story of a collector of collection,
Deemer, and his curator who narrates the story and tried to make sense of Deemer’s collection.
Most of Kroetsch’s novels are sadly out-of-print, but the University of Alberta Press has
reprinted his finest novel, one of my favorites, What the Crow Said.
2. From Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogs. Eds. Charles Keil and Steven Feld. Chicago: U Of
Chicago P, 1994.
3. From The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1994. p. 69-70.
4. To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. Woodstock, NY:
Overlook, 2002. p. 18.
5. Quoted in Windsor, John. “Identity Parades.” The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner
and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. p. 55.
6.To Have and to Hold. p. 206.
7. From Arcades Project, in Benjamin’s cataloging system, [H1a,2]. For many years, Benjamin
worked on the Arcades Project, a lengthy collection of quotes and commentary on history,
capitalism, and the arcades (precursors to outdoor malls) of Paris in the late 19th century. A
1000+ page translated compilation of this uncompleted masterpiece was published in 1999.
8. Qtd. in “‘Unless you do these crazy things . . .’: An Interview with Robert Opie.”The Cultures
of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. p. 34.
9. From the Arcades Project [H4a, 2].
10. From The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Concentrated World. New York,
Vintage, 2001. p. 13.
11. From “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. p. 61.
12. For more information on Bob Pinson’s life as a collector/curator, see Marshall Wyatt’s “‘The
Music Has Always Held Sway:’ An Interview with Bob Pinson, The Old Time Herald Volume 6,
Number 4.
13. To Have and to Hold. p. 215.
14. From “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages.” The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John
Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. p. 116.