The final phase of this journey examines my own collections to establish if there are relationships or commonalities between them. The first step in this process was to identify all my collections – not a simple or quick task. However, I was aided by the CONTRAB list of collections and by the diagram of THE BOX – both described in earlier posts. I simply put all the collection names from these two sets of material down the left side of a spreadsheet, and each different room/area in my house and garden in a separate column along the top. Then I took the contents of each room in turn and marked which collection names they belonged to. For example, one of the bedrooms contained Books, Furniture, Linen and Soft Furnishings, Wall Hangings, Lamps, and Clothing & Accessories. Having done that I summarised what objects each collection name contained. For example, the collection name ‘Books’ had books of various different types in 12 rooms/areas. Then followed a rather laborious process of rationalising and renaming the collection names to satisfy my own thinking about what collections I possess. The outcome was a list of 92 collections in the high-level categories shown below. Note that collections belonging solely to my wife are excluded, but collections owned jointly are included: hence household goods and the like appear on the list.

• Decorative objects – 5 collections
• IT and Audio-Visual items – 5
• Toys and Games – 3
• Books – 10
• Pamphlets and Magazines – 5
• Documents – 6
• Family history – 4
• Correspondence- 3
• Pastime collections – 13
• Household Goods – 24
• Garden and Outdoor Goods – 8
• DIY Goods – 3
• Personal Apparel and Care – 3

This  exercise revealed the first insight I shall explore – that of Collection Consciousness:  becoming aware that some items constitute a collection, naming it, and becoming clearer about what it contains. The Decorative Objects category provides a good example. This includes the Ornaments collection which contains ornaments of all shapes and sizes residing in all parts of the house. I would not normally think about all these objects as a collection in their own right. However, the fact that they do logically fit together was clearly brought home to me when I was clearing a house and photographed a large selection of ornaments to see if family members wanted any of them. The Household Objects category provides many similar examples including the collections I named ‘Furniture’ and ‘Mirrors’. These categories not only illustrate how individuals can become conscious of a collection, but also provide an example of the thinking that goes on in that process: in the CONTRAB collections, larger, wall-hanging, mirrors could have been perceived as pieces of furniture; however, there were also smaller mirrors on stands to sit on a surface, and it seemed less logical to classify these as ‘Furniture’. Hence the establishment of the separate ‘Mirrors’ collection.

This small sequence of perception and thinking illustrates how people may become conscious of collections and decide what they include and what they should be called. It is all very subjective, highly dependent on the individual and current circumstances; and liable to change for the sake of expediency. Another example illustrates just how subjective this process can be: I’ve had a working toy steam engine set with a boiler and four appliances since I was a young boy.

It’s been sitting in the lofts of my various houses for over 40 years, and I’ve never considered it to be a collection. However, when I encountered it in the course of this exercise, I decided I wanted to see it as something in its own right, and rationalised that the four appliances were a collection of appliances. Consequently, the ‘Steam Engine Set’ is now a collection within the ‘Toys and Games’ category. I can see how this might be considered a dubious categorisation and that logically it should be part of the ‘Children’s Toys’ collection – but I want to see it as something in its own right so that it can be dealt with separately from ‘Children’s Toys’ which may just get randomly disposed of at some time in the future. This awareness of what I might want to happen to a collection downstream was also a factor in the 10 different collections in the Books category. Four of these collections – Mystery Books, Personal Books, Family Books, Work Books – all sit together on the bookcases in my study, and could have been classified as a single collection. However, I have clear ideas of what I want to happen to these different collections and so have placed them into separate collections. For example, having completed some work on my collection of Mysteries books, I anticipate selling it; and I hope that the Family book collection will be passed on down the generations of my family. A final example illustrates how sometimes the perception of a collection may simply be the result of trying to rationalise where to fit individual objects into the overall category structure that has been created in the mind. This concerns a category I have named ‘Laundry equipment’ and includes the objects washing machine, tumble dryer, Iron, wash basket, and plastic laundry basket. At first, I had the bedroom wash basket down as a piece of furniture, but that didn’t seem quite right. I also had the washing machine and tumble dryer as part of kitchen equipment. The resolution of this conundrum was to create the ‘Laundry Equipment’ collection. The implications of the observations for the relationship between collections is simply that the relationships, if any, are built in the owner’s mind. However, all these examples relate mainly to Accumulation-type collections, and have occurred during the very unusual process of defining all the collections within all of an individual’s possessions, and therefore may not be generalisable. Though, I suspect that they may well indicate the sort of thinking that goes on in the more commonplace dealings that individuals have with their Amateur Collections, Files, and Archives.