What a Collection Is For

Once a year I count the buttons. It takes an afternoon. There are four hundred and twelve, in a shallow wooden tray with a cloth lining, and the number goes up by two or three between each count.

Nobody has asked me what they are for. I have asked myself, and for a long time the answers were poor.

Not for value

The first answer is that it is an investment. It isn't. Nothing in the tray would fetch more than a few coins, and some of it, I am fairly sure, has no price at all. A collection of ordinary things doesn't earn. It costs a little, in time and shelf space, and gives back something harder to count.

The second answer is nostalgia. That's closer, but it is not enough. I did not grow up with these buttons. I found most of them in a market in my forties.

For attention

What I think a collection is for is attention. It's an arrangement that makes you look. If you own one button you may never examine it. If you own four hundred, you begin to see them: the small tin one with a stamped anchor, the bone one that has gone the colour of tea, the two matching jet ones that were once on a coat for somebody's funeral.

The pleasure isn't in having. It's in the looking that having permits. A collection says, in effect, spend time here.

For order

There's a second use, and it's quieter. A collection imposes an order on a small part of the world. I sort the buttons by material, then by size, then by date where I can guess one. It's a modest sort of control, but it matters in a life that otherwise resists sorting.

Anyone who has put a drawer in order knows the feeling. It isn't joy exactly. It's a settling.

For company

And, honestly, for company. The objects were made by hands I'll never know and used by people who are gone. They carry traces: a thread still looped through a hole, a dent where a thumb pushed. To hold one is to be briefly in a room with someone else.

I don't want to push this too far. A button is a button. But when I turn the tray under the lamp and the light moves across four hundred small surfaces, I have a sense of being among others.

A test

If you want to know whether you're a collector, ask what you would miss. Not what you would pay to replace. What you would miss.

If the answer is a particular object, you're attached. If it's the hours spent with them, the sorting, the turning over, the small decisions about where each one goes, then you've found what a collection is for. It's for the time it asks of you, and what the time does.