Collections of Nothing
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. 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.
Read more about Collections of Nothing at the University of Chicago Press(link is external).
Find the book on Amazon(link is external).
Check out a mostly complete list of reviews, feature stories, interviews, and other things that grew from this publication, at the bottom of this page.
My envelope linings were on display in a huge exhibition of collecting at the downtown Los Angeles Library, sponsored by the LA Library Foundation. Todd Lerew was the intrepid collector of collecting, who contacted me and about 500 other collectors in the area. He chose my volume of envelope linings for the show, along with the typewriters of Tom Hanks and the candy wrappers of Darlene Lacey, and many other things. The show was called 21 Collectors: Every Object Has a Story
Here is a link to the page:
https://www.lapl.org/events/exhibits/21-collections
This is a fun podcast about the show by the Kitchen Sisters:
http://www.kitchensisters.org/present/21collections/
And here is a story about the show in LA Magazine (I'm quoted):
https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/21-collections-central-library/
Many collections:
- Product labels (specializing in cereal boxes, crackers, soup can labels, tuna fish, beans, olives, berries, water, cheese, toothpaste, but much else besides)
- “Place Stamp Here” squares (from return envelopes)
- Envelope linings (some call them security seals)
- Business cards, plastic cards
- Kitchen collection (the most eph of ephemera, such as PLU stickers, tea bag tags, etc.)
- Chain and scam letters
- Netflix flaps
- Postcards
- Dross,
- Etc.
Since about 1999, I have amassed what I call my "kitchen collection," which consists of the lowest sort of ephemera, stuff that might in most people's lives go into the (kitchen) trash bin, like the little stickers (PLUs--"price look-ups") that you find on fruit. I previously kept scrapbooks of pieces of ephemera that I liked, but I wanted this collection to be sensitive to and discriminatory at a level closer to actual nothingness.
I hung two framed pieces of blank paper on either side of my kitchen sink, and as I encountered something of this sort, almost anything but staying away from duplicates, I stuck it on the paper. When the page filled, I put it in a binder and hung up a new piece of blank paper. A couple of decades later, I have three thick binders full of these pages in plastic sleeves.
What you will see in the gallery below is a sample of pages.
I have a fantasy of finding a large gallery or a museum wall-- a few hundred square feet--where I could mount this entire collection. After the A side of each sleeve has been on display for a while, I would turn the page so that the B side could be on display for a while. I did a small version of this in the exhibit called The Creative Edge of Collecting, which is discussed elsewhere on this website. It was dazzling. A larger display would be exponentially more so.
There are some sections among my enormous collection of product labels that I especially like, and one is fresh blueberries. Unlike some other categories of fresh fruit, where the product is sold by a consortium like Minute Maid or Driscoll's, blueberries still get sold with labels from the separate growers, so you are likely to see a much wider variety for sale in a store. The beautiful blue of the berry shows through the plastic container, and the small label does what it can to enhance that appeal.
I keep them in a special binder, usually one label per page.
I have almost 300. See a sample below.
This is my "log of labels," a twenty-year accumulation of water labels, six hundred or so. I like that the "bark" of all those plastic bottles now occupies the parched, acid-heavy pages of an old ledger book. It bulges with the weight/wet.
I write about the water labels collection, and others, in an essay collected in a recent anthology of essays about collecting: Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things, edited by Kevin M. Moist and David Banash, just out from Scarecrow.http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Collecting-Objects-Practices-Things/d...(link is external)
One of the editors, David Banash, has also written about my envelope linings collection in his book, Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Fate of Things, just out from Rodopi
Reviews (in chronological order, roughly)
Review of Collections of Nothing, Times Higher Education, June 19, 2008
Review of Collections of Nothing in “Books Briefly Noted,” New Yorker, July 7, 2008
Review of Collections of Nothing, readerville.com—July 1, 2008
Review of Collections of Nothing, omnivoracious.com—July 1, 2008
Sara Nelson, “Introducing the Never-Heard-Of Must-Read,” Publisher’s Weekly, July 2, 2008
Henry Alford, “The Curator,” New York Times Book Review, July 27, 2008
Colin Marshall, “Wheaties and Nothingness: UCSB Professor William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing,” Santa Barbara Independent, 22:131 (July 17-24, 2008)
Leslie Westbrook, [Santa Barbara] Daily Sound, July 24, 2008
Dawoud Bey, “Why Do We Collect?” Art Talk Chicago, July 25, 2009
Janice Harayda, “Why Do People Collect Stamps, Beer Mugs or First Editions of Novels? William Davies King Answers in Collections of Nothing,” August 12, 2008 oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com
Richard J. Cox, “The Strange World of Collecting,” reading archives.blogspot,com—August 14, 2008
David Banash, “Collection Obsession: William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing,” PopMatters, August 15, 2008
Martha Beck, Review of Collections of Nothing, corduroybooks.wordpress.com—August 16, 2008
Robert Birnbaum, “Reading Collections of Nothing,” The Morning News—www.themorningnews.org—August 18, 2008
“Why Are Some of Us Cursed with the Need to Collect Radios?” herculodge.typepad.com, August 18, 2008
Julia Keller, Review of The Thing Itself and Collections of Nothing, Chicago Tribune, August 31, 2008
Reprinted in Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Tri-City Herald
Susan Schwartz, “Collectibles Offer the Thrill of the Hunt and a Sense of Belonging,” Montreal Gazette, September 1, 2008
John Sutherland, “Collective Instinct,” Financial Times, October 4, 2008
Elizabeth Ryan, Review of Collections of Nothing, Utne Reader, November-December 2008 http://www.utne.com/2008-11-01/Arts/Utne-Reader-Book-Reviews-November-December-2008.aspx
Christina Stind, review of Collections of Nothing, goodreads.com, December 13, 2008
M. L. Van Valkenburgh, Review of Collections of Nothing, [Chicago) Beachwood Reporter, December 16, 2008. Also reprinted in Charleston City Paper.
William Leith, “Collections of Nothing: Beyond the Wildest Dreams,” The Spectator, December 16, 2008
Rachel Toor, Review of Collections of Nothing, Ploughshares, Fall 2009
James Bell, Review of Collections of Nothing, torontoreads.wordpress.com, February 9, 2009
Sarah Burke, “Overcollected: Reading William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing,” www.bookslut.com, March 5, 2009
Gregory McNamee, “The Curse of Books,” Encyclopedia Brittanica Blog, www.britannica.com, March 25, 2009
Dale Rigby, “Acquisition Disquisition,” American Book Review, March-April 2009
David Profumo, “The World Sucks Rocks: Collections of Nothing,” Literary Review, April 2009, 35-36
Review of Collections of Nothing, April 14, 2009 www.polymath07.blogspot.com
Review of Collections of Nothing, www.esmereldasbookthing.blogspot.com, April 15, 2009
Review of Collections of Nothing, “From un collecteur to uncollector,” www.thanksgivingisruined.blogspot.com, May 13, 2009
Sarah James, “The Incompleat Completist,” www.popkrazy.com, January 12, 2010
Linda McCullough Moore, “’To Collect Is to Write a Life’: Intimations of hope fulfilled in the memoir of a man who treasures trash,” Books & Culture: A Christian Review, www.booksandculture.com, February 26, 2010
Review of Collections of Nothing, sweetiepiepress.blogspot.com, March 21, 2010
John Latta, Review of Collections of Nothing, Isola di Rifiuti, May 18, 2010
Robin Nagle, “Collecting? Or Hoarding?” Discard Studies, blog at wordpress.com, August 29, 2010
Collateral Publications, etc.
Excerpt printed in Harper’s , 316:1896 (May 2008), 27-28
William Davies King, “Nothing to Speak About, essay on University of Chicago Press site, http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/437002_essay.html
Excerpt on DesignObserver.com, July 14, 2008
Televised review of the book on Current TV, July 31, 2008 http://current.com/groups/on-current-tv/89155406_collections-of-nothing.htm
Interview on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, August 6, 2008
Interview by Pat Morrison on “The Pat Morrison Show,” KPCC, August 19, 2008
Webcast interview by Deborah Harper for Psychjourney—www.psychjourneypodcast.com—September 8, 2008
Interview by Marty Weil on Ephemera: The World of Old Paper, http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2008/12/collections-of.html December 3, 2008
“A Passion for Stuff: Collections of Nothing,” website of Talk of the Nation, www.npr.org, December 30, 2008
Interview by Neil Conan on “Talk of the Nation,” NPR, January 4, 2009
David Starkey interview on “The Creative Community,” January 16, 2009
Excerpt printed in Museum, 88:1 (January/February 2009), 48-53
Interview by Harry Rinker on “Whatcha Got?” syndicated radio show, February 1, 2009
Profiled by Theresa Shadrix, Longleaf Style Magazine, Spring 2009
Pauline Lubens, “A Whole Lot of Nothing,” Audio slideshow profile on website of the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2009
William Davies King, “Recollecting Nothing,” PowellsBooks.Blog (September 29, 2009)—essay about writing the book at http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=8494
Interviewed by Sandra M. Jones for “Virtual museums gain curators, viewers,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 2010
Interviewed on film for a documentary on collecting by Meredith Chang and Paul Vlachos—not sure when the film will be finished
Interviewed on film for “Obsessive Possessives” by Louisa Achille—not sure when the film will be finished