A collector's joys

And now let me move away from the contentiously big issues of the past two weeks (thanks for all the mail, folks, pro and con) back to my comfort zone — the trivial and the transitory.

I’m going to indulge myself in a bit of chatter about one of the strangest of human impulses, the urge to collect, and by that I mean the compulsion to find, to acquire, and to keep more than one of basically the same thing (although collectors will argue that no two objects of theirs are ever truly and exactly alike).

It doesn’t really matter what the particular objects are — they could be Amorsolos, cars, matchboxes, swizzle sticks, dolls, Star Wars figurines, handbags, knives, or battle tanks (yes, the real thing, not the toys — Google the name “Jacques Littlefield” and enjoy, if you can, his collection of 66 tanks, not to mention 160 more military vehicles). The obsessive drive’s the same — a knot in the stomach and an itch in the fingers, a sudden breathlessness that seizes the collector upon sensing a target-object on the horizon, more so within grabbing distance.

I felt that telltale anxiety sweep over me a month ago, when — right after my writers’ festival stint in New York — I took a side trip to Chicago to treat myself to something I hadn’t experienced in almost 20 years: a pen show, and a major one at that. The annual Chicago pen show is America’s largest showcase of vintage pens, and the lift I got from attending it — first in 1990, and then this May — has been equaled only by another personal pilgrimage, not to Lourdes or anything so holy, but to the Macworld Expo in San Francisco in 2006, and just a notch down to the Volkswagen factory and museum in Wolfsburg in 2004.

Collecting is a form of misery, and misery loves company; that’s what a pen show is all about, a weekend’s gathering of the global faithful (none originating farther than me, in Chicago). For two or three days, everything strange makes perfect sense, in that special language intelligible only to the initiated: “Is that ebonite feed screw-in or friction-fit? And, oh, I think a silicone sac will be better than latex for your Mandarin Duofold….”

Displaying herculean restraint, I picked up only three pens in Chicago among the many thousands laid out on the dealers’ tables. To be honest, it was probably more a paucity of resources that kept me in check, a eunuch in the harem. (Having to dip into their grocery kitty, collectors quickly become expert not just at their subjects, but also at finding reasons and excuses for their self-indulgence. My noble justification for splurging on inky tubes in a time of recession is that my savings are better parked in re-saleable antiques than in low-interest deposits susceptible to bank failures. At least that’s what I tell Beng, who, bless her soul, is a fountain of trust.)

Indeed, collecting sadly involves money, so those of us with less of the green stuff have to make up with gray matter. For me, this means scoring bargains on eBay — the collector’s Paradiso and Inferno all in the same place — using my wits and some tricks I’ll teach you some other time. Meanwhile, here are some lessons I’ve picked up from 20 years of pen collecting, applicable as well, I suppose, to Barbie dolls and Abrams tanks:

1. It takes time to discover what you really want (in my case, Parker Vacumatics, Pelikans, and Montblancs). In the meanwhile, you might run around like a headless chicken, and pick up every object in sight. It’s good to have a collecting plan, but it’s also good to be loose enough to be open to surprises.

2. Collecting is a lifelong learning process. As with all learning, you make mistakes — and you should be able to forgive yourself for them. Two decades into the hobby, I’ve still overpaid for pens I should’ve done more research on — but then I’ve also made great bargains by acting decisively or even impulsively, going by gut feel.

3. Collecting and using pens or whatever it is you collect (unless you’re a professional dealer) should be a pleasure, not a job. When collecting becomes mechanical acquisition, just because you can afford the item or just because you have to fill an empty slot in the tray, it may be time to pause and give things a rest.

4. At some point, it’ll be good to pass on the good stuff to younger, newer collectors. I’ll hold on to my best pens to bequeath to my daughter and son-in-law, but as the years go by I’ll be selling off other pens to younger people at prices they can afford, to allow them to share my joy and my obsession — or even just the sheer and increasingly rare pleasure of writing with wet ink on a blank, dry page.

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Speaking of collecting, a couple of months ago, I attended a different kind of book launching at the Manila Polo Club — unusual if only because no books were actually on sale. The books were there, for sure, but none of them had a price sticker, because they were all meant to be given away to the invited guests — friends all of the three authors, Jimmy Laya, Bert Bravo, and Mar Lao — in exchange for a donation to one’s favorite charity.

The sumptuously produced coffee-table book itself was also something of a one-off. Titled Hidden Treasures, Simple Pleasures (Bookhaven, 2009), it’s a visual record of the personal collections of three fast friends, all successful business leaders, who turned a brain wave into a virtual catalogue of some of the best art you can find in this country, outside the museums. Exquisitely photographed by Wig Tysmans, the book offers page after page of Ocampos, Manansalas, Amorsolos, Botongs, santos, antique statuary and jewelry, and the odd object or two (how about a golf course and a Mercedes-Benz?).

Jimmy Laya — to whose previous book Consuming Passions: Philippine Collectibles (Anvil, 2003) I had contributed a chapter on fountain pens — asked me to edit and introduce the book, and I was happy to oblige, since I felt that — as a collector myself, albeit of much smaller and more modest objects — I understood the passion of these three gentlemen for things of beauty.

Private collectors do what the government can’t and probably shouldn’t: they seek, they find, they acquire, and they preserve some of the best that artists can come up with. Through books like this, they also share what they have with the rest of us.

The objects represented in Hidden Treasures, Simple Pleasures (well, “simple” might be, shall we say, stretching a point) may not all fall under the rubric of fine art, but even their exuberant eclecticism brings a note of freshness, a touch of the amateur in the original sense of the word as a lover, rather than a professional acquirer, of things.

One of the best descriptions of a collector that I’ve come across was in a book titled Objects of Desire — a book on the American antiques trade by a journalist-historian named Thatcher Freund. He said: “Decorators tend to see objects in the context of a room, while the eyes of a collector always fall on a single object.”

As you can see from the book (although I wonder how other people will ever get one, making this an instant collectors’ item in itself), these men have been to many rooms, and saw many single objects, now all together in one place, thanks to this unique adventure in art and friendship — the friendship of art, the art of friendship.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.