Notes on Collecting

I suspect many readers of this blog are interested collecting books.  I’ve decide to share my thoughts on collecting through a series of essays.  I hope you find it interesting and useful.

I think of their being two types of collectors, which I refer to as enthusiasts and investors.  As the name implies, an enthusiast collects base on his interests.  An investor collects based on the value of the items collected.

I suspect most collectors are enthusiasts.  They started collecting books or other objects because of their interest in them.  Enthusiast collectors run from casual to serious.  Some enthusiasts can become experts in their field.

Investors are interested in items for their value.  Like investors in anything else, they may you can distinguish between traders and buy-and-hold investors.  Traders usually don’t hold onto an item for long.  They are looking for the book, comic, or other collectable that is undervalued (i.e., on sale for a dollar at the thrift store) that they can quickly resell for a better price in another market, hopefully hitting it big occasionally.  A successful trader must know the value of his collectables and have access to retail buyers so he can recognize a bargain and quickly turn a profit.  Buy-and-hold investors take a longer view, believing that their collectables will grow in value over the course of years, or at least hold their value against inflation.  It helps to recognize a bargain, but it is more helpful to distinguish lasting quality from trends that will crash.

Of course, all of these things can overlap.  An enthusiast may put together a collection that eventually becomes very valuable.  His expertise can make him an excellent buy-and-hold investor.  A trader may fall in love with a few interesting pieces that she keeps for her own enjoyment.  Any collector might find opportunities to help a fellow collector and make a few bucks while they’re at it because they’ve developed some knowledge of what other people want and what it is worth to them.

I encourage you to think about your primary motivation for collecting.  Are you an enthusiast?  Do you have a casual interest or a near obsession?  Are you interested in collectables as investment?  Do you want to trade to make some income or are you looking to park you money in something that will grow in value?  Answering these questions for yourself will help you to make better decisions about your collection.

Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.