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University Of Chicago Press
August 2008
On Sale: July 25, 2008
160 pages ISBN: 0226437000 EAN: 9780226437002 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don’t
think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on
the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing—
and a lot of it. Captivated by the detritus of everyday
life, King has spent a lifetime gathering a monumental mass
of miscellany, from cereal boxes to boulders to broken
folding chairs. Junk, you might call it—and so might King,
at times. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look
at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal
about the impulse to accumulate. Part memoir, part
reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of
Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was
given as a boy. Philatelism’s long-standing rules governing
the care and display of collections soon proved an
oppressive burden in the midst of the family chaos
generated by his sister’s growing mental illness; choosing
to ignore the rules, King began to handle and display his
collection according to his own desires—the first step in
his search for an unexplored, individual meaning in
collecting. In the following years, rather than rarity or
pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the
lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely
by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with
meaning, even value. As he relates the story of his
burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating
meditation on the human urge to collect. Whether it’s
nondescript loops of wire and old food labels or more
commonly prized objects like first editions or baseball
cards, our collections define us at least as much as we
define them. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation
and dissection of the collector’s art as seen through the
life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who
has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive
fever.
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