74

The Collector’s Issue

10.05.2012

Guest
Editor

By the multi-talented Mr Neil Boorman; writer, creative consultant and recovering shopaholic


This week Shoreditch’s favourite son, Mr Neil Boorman, introduces us to a group of collectors who collect the un-keepable, things not made for ‘collecting’. So don’t expect football stickers, 18th Century art or books full of autographs; we’ll be introducing you to collectors of shopping bags, fruit stickers and rubbers, because a personal collection is only personal if you’ve been through an emotional journey to get it. Enjoy and get collecting.


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The proper, nerdy collector

You can walk into a design shop and buy a collection of 20th Century furniture. You can pay a lifestyle concierge to build you a collection of art books. You can upload an eBay wants list and wait for your vintage Westwood to arrive. Which is great if you’re cash rich and time poor. But let’s be honest, this doesn’t really equate to a personal collection.



 


Collections are only ever personal when the objects that fill them have meaning. And objects only become meaningful when we’ve gone through an emotional journey to get hold of them.
 
So, while anyone can collect football stickers, it takes a certain type of person to collect ‘super-soakers’ (see story image, Chris Read’s Super Soaker Collection is huge). And so the people featured in this edition of SFTW are proper, nerdy collectors. They spend their free time wading through the backwaters of culture to source new additions. And none of the stuff they buy is actually worth anything. Well, not individually.

 


As a collection they are priceless inventories of popular culture. Like plastic bag collector Gareth Hague says, ‘Collecting something that isn't made to be kept is more valuable than collecting 'collectables'.

 

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Retro Space-Age Cantaloupe

Chrissy Levett is obsessed with fruit stickers. She’s willing to be chased down streets for them. She can’t travel abroad without detours to local shops. She’ll often return home from missions with new finds stuck halfway up her arm. Which is perverse because, as she’s the first to admit, fruits stickers are pretty much designed for the bin. But as the following soundbites from Chrissy show, even bin-destined objects can take on great personal value to a collector.
 
‘My collection started thirty years ago. I stuck a Jaffa sticker in my exercise book and I was hooked. Mike Melon’s from Australia is probably one of the most memorable stickers from the early days’.
 
‘I’m an obsessive collector. I keep them in a large book in no particular order. I may do a bit of stickering once or twice a month and look through them, sharing my obsession with folk from work or friends

 


who come to my home. It feels incredibly nerdy but I don’t care one bit’.

‘The best place for hunting new stickers is markets, especially abroad. The Middle East has ones with the most bling. I couldn’t possibly buy all the fruit that the stickers are attached to, so I tend to peel them off and make a dash for it. I was in Singapore once, and a shop owner caught me. He dragged me by the hair, back to the shop and made me pay for the fruit. I remember the sticker; it was a pink heart. I just had to have it’.
 
‘My best ever find is a tiny metallic oval shaped sticker with a beautifully drawn Saint Nick holding a single Satsuma with a single leaf; its enchanting. Then there’s a melon sticker from



 


Spain with a German Shepherd dog on it. And a retro space-age cantaloupe sticker printed in bright orange and blue on fabric’.

Co‘To me, they are tiny little works of art – graphic gems, every font, every colour, badly printed on sub-straights. They have humour and history, they are international and best of all, they take up very little space’.
 
Chrissy Levett is Creative Director at LFH
lumn 3 - Content here




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Paul Rand Reads The Same Way Upside Down

CThey rot away in landfill, blow around deserted streets, and clog up cupboards under the sink. But Gareth Hague still loves carrier bags. He’s built an enormous collection over thirty years; a kaleidoscopic account of British retail and global brand identity. And an account that reflects a moment in time; the carrier bag’s days may well be numbered thanks to green campaigns, online shopping and failing high streets. Lucky, then, that Gareth managed to keep hold of a few.
 
‘Carrier bags are totally disposable; you take your shopping home in them, and then throw them away. But I see them as an ephemeral record of their time. And some of them are beautiful; the design, printing, materials; they record the care that brands take in presenting themselves’.



 


‘I started collecting in my mid-teens. I was always conscious of my labels. The bag was a way of remembering the thrill of a purchase. I had a phase of being fascinated by a French brand called New Man. It wasn’t widely available in the UK. I saw the stuff in local shops when I was on family holidays to France. They had a great logo by Paul Rand, which read the same way upside down. A yellow rectangular plastic bag with a vertical New Man logo; that was the beginning of my collection. Now I have 8 huge storage boxes of them in my study’.
olumn 1 - Content here





 


‘I'm interested in how shops and brands present themselves. Balenciaga's bag is rubbish! Why? Can they not be bothered? But it’s not just big brands, I also like 'un-designed' bags from shops that are maybe too small to care about branding’.
 

‘There are other collectors out there, but there’s no official archive of carrier bags. The V&A had a carrier bag exhibition in its Terence Conran Boilerhouse space in 1985. In terms of branding, today’s retail landscape is hugely challenging. There feels - with some exceptions – that there’s a greater level of homogeneity nowadays. I view the 1980s high street of my formative teens with rose-tinted specs’.
 
Gareth Hague is a graphic and type designer for Alias
 

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Sniff Through Tiny Holes

 
Playground crazes – every generation of teenager has lived through them. Today it’s planking and happy slapping. Back in the ‘80’s it was smelly rubbers. Remember how the media flew into a blind panic at this ‘addictive’ and ‘deadly’ craze? This is how Liz Simon got hooked.
 
‘These little fellas were my pals when I grew up. I’d make up stories; group them in different orders depending on my storyline. Looking at them now, they trigger memories of school days; how me and my mates would go to Leeds and buy up stationery. Anything pink, strawberry or grape scented. It would start with an innocent miniature rainbow rubber, set on a glittery stand, aching to grace the top of your super slim star-covered plain white pencil. The smells were addictive. On Mondays we’d spend lunch times nose down in Saturday’s buys’.

‘I’ve got so many favourites; the miniature Ariel box, white t-shirt inside and the camera
 

 


with the roll of film. And the Parisian dog. There's something so perfect and real about the dog, I love the packaging, like a little dog carrier’.

‘I keep them in the same shoebox there were in when I left home in 1989. There’s so much joy inside it – on par with 150 pairs of new shoes a day. I plan to get each eraser encased in an individual Perspex cube; toughened, so they can be spilled and rolled around like they always were but preserved’.





 


‘Their value comes from me having held onto them for so long. And they’re intact! If I could bring back their scents, now that would be special. I’d throw a party and everyone could sniff through tiny holes in the boxes’.
 
Liz Simon is the picture editor of Psychologies Magazine and creative director at Burlexe.




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Design Wrapped Around A Brilliant Idea

The most expensive book in the world is ‘The Birds of America’, written by John James Audubon in 1827. Someone recently paid $10.3m for a copy. The most valuable book in the world – at least for collector Richard Weston - is an edition of the New Penguin Shakespeare series. And it only cost him 60p. 
‘Penguin books are great graphic design wrapped around a brilliant idea. There’s a rich history inextricably linked to the major players of graphic design; and all totally accessible. For a few quid you can buy a piece of work by Abram Games, Alan Fletcher, Milton Glaser and Jan Tschichold’.
 
‘I search for them in any second hand bookshop I come across. Charity shops are good but there's no guarantee you'll find anything for weeks - months even. So you just have to be diligent. I don’t have a wants list. It's all about the thrill of discovery’.





 

 
‘Germano Facetti is probably responsible for more covers from the era I like than anyone else. He was Head of Design at Penguin between '62 and '71. It was Facetti that commissioned Romek Marber to develop the famous grid system, initially for the Crime series, but eventually rolled out across the Main series and Pelicans. It's a superb system. But the Crime series is my favourite. It seems authors were paired with designers. If you get a bunch of Ed McBain books together you'll find all the covers are by Alan Spain. They really work as a set’.





 

 
‘Some Pelicans from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s are becoming much more elusive now. You could buy through a dealer if you were looking for something specific. A good place, if you want to start a collection, is the Penguin Collectors Society’. 
 
Richard Weston is Head of Strategic Design at thoughtcollective and the author of the graphic design blog Ace Jet 170

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About the Author

Neil Boorman is a writer, creative consultant and recovering shopaholic. He creates content for NGO’s, helps fashion designers build brand architecture, and writes good old-fashioned print copy for Esquire and The Times. He currently collects the labels from processed cheese triangles. Donations to this collection are gratefully received and can be sent via www.neilboorman.com (no Laughing Cow please).

Credits

Lead Image. Mother’s very own Salvador Brown; Story 1. XXX; Story 2. Salvador Brown; Story 3. Salvador Brown; Story 4. Liz Simon; Story 5. Richard Weston.

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