HOBBIES COLLECT DUST
Obsessive pastimes disappear under the weight of socially mediated self-expression
Would you like to come up and see my comic collection? Not, perhaps, the most appealing chat-up line. It might sound a little sexier if you added that a Superman No. 1 from 1939 fetched $5.3 million in 2022. But the idea of a comic collection reeks a little too heavily of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, or the insufferable vinyl snobs in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
Yet there was a time when people could indulge obsessive hobbies and collections — and were not, perhaps, as much sneered at as they might be today. Some of the world’s wealthiest and most successful people were avid stamp collectors: from Alphonse Mayer von Rothschild to Freddie Mercury of Queen and, well, the late Queen, herself.
The idea of collecting stamps, coins or invertebrates stems, I suspect, from a desire to encompass the world, to acquire and possess it in miniature and enjoy the differences.
To have an album of stamps from exotic places in an era when few could afford to travel widely was to create a kind of microcosm of authentic artifacts that spanned both space and time.
These days, we might take a city break. At the top end, stamps still sell. A British Guiana 1c magenta went for almost twice the value of that Superman comic, but most of the lovingly curated albums in our lofts are worth almost nothing now.
In the U.S., membership of the American Philatelic Society peaked in 1988 at nearly 58,000. Last year, there were fewer than half that amount. In the U.K., the average age of a collector is over 60. Those kinds of hobbies seem to be disappearing and the eccentric collections — old postcards, matchbooks, shells, cigar or luggage labels and the rest — seem to be in terminal decline.
Perhaps convenience and accessibility led to the demise. If everything is available via ebay to everyone everywhere, the pleasure in the serendipitous find is diluted — values are easy to check, expertise and knowledge are degraded.
But the decline in collections is perhaps most visible in our homes. As with so many hobbies, there was a sense that these were activities in exile, eccentric pastimes undertaken in isolation in the leftover spaces — lofts, cellars, garden sheds. Are there still attics with vast railway layouts wrapping round the eaves? Are there basements stuffed with miniature steam engines or spare rooms dedicated to the construction of matchstick cathedrals and scale models of sailing ships?
Hobbies may be being squeezed by the younger generation’s lack of available space.
If young people have managed to move out of their parents’ homes, they find themselves in house shares or cramped flats with precious little room to display their porcelain cats or Matchbox cars.
In the late 19th century, the proliferation of rooms in the grandest of houses, accommodating everything from billiards to guns, established a precedent. But they were an expression of wealth and often, perhaps, part of an effort to find something to fill the incredible amount of redundant rooms that large country houses generated. So they were stuffed with sculptures and art but also tapestries, antique furniture, cabinets of curiosities, suits of armour, swords, stuffed bears and the rest.
The passion then trickled down to classes who had less space, so the worlds of collecting and hobbies were shrunk to a more manageable scale: cigarette or baseball cards, stamps, medals, butterflies, badges, ships in bottles and so on, easily stored in or on top of cupboards or in cabinets.
Most of these spaces, it is true, were for men who had time to indulge them while their wives did something useful.
There were, occasionally, rooms for women too; sewing rooms, for instance, but these invariably accommodated something practical, so don’t entirely count. Virginia Woolf’s acknowledgment that it was her independent means which allowed her a room of her own in which to think and write highlights exactly how rare a privilege this was.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t voracious women collectors, of course. Bettina Dorfmann’s 18,500 Barbies now look weirdly on the money and artist Madelon Vriesendorp’s acquisition of wonderful kitsch souvenirs inclines toward installation rather than collection.
Today, hobbies remain one of the last apparently legitimate areas of ridicule. Perhaps that’s also why they’ve faded away.
Self-expression now comes in more obvious and socially mediated forms and doesn’t need to be sublimated in a stamp album. Perhaps as we spend more time in a gym than poring over collections, the site of interest has become the body (are tattoos the new collections?). Certainly, shoe collections, once the preserve of women such as Imelda Marcos, have leached into male culture, with connoisseurs populating entire rooms in their houses with box-fresh trainers.
Yet most of our homes, with their framed photos of our children and acceptably modern art prints, are the poorer for it, shorn of the strange obsessions and fanatical collections they once had. And the modern interior is smoother, emptier, less dusty and that little bit blander for it.