Enough Is Enough: Thinking Through Collections at an Endpoint

Hey! The big news is that my new book about collecting has "launched" at the University of Chicago Press. That means it has gone into the production phase, which takes a while, including a cover design (what you see is my own crude concept). They say the book will be "out" in August 2027.

My working title of this book had been Having/Had: Thinking Through Collecting at an Endpoint. But some marketing issues were raised about that, and so this better title has emerged. The book grew out of my teaching of a Discovery Seminar at UCSB, which I created back in 2007 and have since taught more than thirty times. That means about 600 students have participated in this one-unit seminar in which we ThInk Through Collecting. We consider the psychology, history, sociology, philosophy, economics, and art of collecting, also the reason why collecting is not hoarding and how collecting can be part of a life story. I bring in items from my "collections of nothing," and students give presentations about some topic they have researched about collecting, their own or someone else's. 

This book loosely takes the form of that seminar, though with the academic disciplines turned into existential questions: Who Are We? Why Do We Do This? What Do We Own? How Much Is Too Much? Where Is It Going? and so on. What is added are my thoughts about Having Had--that is, the emergence of the past tense, what it will mean to have been a collector. What will happen when the collection and the collecting and the collector are not?

Please share any thoughts you might have about that!

By the way, I am now officially retired from UCSB, though I am allowed to keep teaching the seminar ad infinitum.

In the meanwhile, I have some new writing projects I'm excited about. More on that to come.