Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1 Collecting in a Virtual World
1. Marcus Boon, “Meditations in an Emergency: On the Apparent
Destruction of My mp3 Collection”
2. Matthew James Vechinski, “Collecting, Curating, and the Magic
Circle of Ownership in a Postmaterial Culture”
3. Phillip Hutchison, “Searching for Cap’n Ernie’s Treasure
Chest:
Collecting and Sharing the Lost History of Live Local Television
Genres”
Part 2 Changing Relationships with Things
4. David Banash, “Virtual Life and the Value of Objects: Nostalgia,
Distinction, and Collecting in the Twenty-First Century”
5. Daniel DeChaine, “Memory, Desire, and the “Good Collector” in
PEZhead Culture”
6. William Davies King, “Suited for Nothing: Collecting Second
Hand”
7. Stanley Cavell, “The World As Things: Collecting Thoughts On
Collecting”
Part 3 Collecting and Identity, Personal and Political
8. Stephen A. Andon, “From the Attic to the Mallpark: A
Collection’s Transition from Private to Public in a New
Professional Baseball Stadium”
9. Mechtild Widrich, “Collecting ‘History in the Making’: The
Privatization of Propaganda in National Socialist Cigarette
Cards”
10. Terri Baker, “‘The record of a life’: Nation and Narrative
in Victorian Women’s Collections”
Part 4 Collecting Practices and Cultural Hierarchies
11. Sophie Thomas, “Distraction and Display: the Curiosity Cabinet
and the Romantic Museum.”
12. Mary Titus, “Collection and Parody: Taliesin and House on the
Rock”
13. Kevin M. Moist, “Record Collecting as Cultural
Anthropology”
Bibliography
Contributor Biographies
Kevin M. Moist is associate professor of communications at
Pennsylvania State University – Altoona College. He has written for
numerous journals, including The Journal of Popular Culture,
American Studies, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and
Studies in Popular Culture.
David Banash is professor of English at Western Illinois
University, where he teaches courses in contemporary American
literature, film, and popular culture. His essays and reviews have
appeared in Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction, Bad Subjects,
American Book Review, and PopMatters. His book Collage Culture:
Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption is forthcoming in
2013.
In editors Moist and Banash's volume on collecting, philosopher
Stanley Cavell writes that "collecting for possession and display
is as primitive as gathering food for survival." The contributors
assess the growing significance of different impulses, forms, and
manifestations of collecting as a cultural practice through a
series of 13 provocative essays. Cavell's foundational treatment
examines different collection guises from Homer to Walter Benjamin.
In the section "Collecting in a Virtual World," the subject is
things that occur in memory, ephemera, and cyberspace, such as
1960s provincial children's television. Banash's essay explores
changing relationships to possessions in a post-material world, the
reclamation of Pez dispensers (a candy-toy combination), and
William King's meditation on a collection of nothing (cast-off
secondhand items). The collecting and identity section visits
baseball memorabilia that moves from a private collection to a
stadium, Nazi cigarette cards (popular tales of Hitler avidly
sought by German youth), and the Victorian women's collections that
helped create a national narrative. A final section on collecting
and hierarchy suggests a cultural anthropology accomplished through
record collecting, Alex Jordan Jr.'s unintentionally comedic House
on the Rock collections, and the evolution of curiosity cabinets
into modern museums. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership
levels.
*CHOICE*
The idea of collecting as a reflection of historical and cultural
development is examined in a series of scholarly essays written by
various authors, differing from the usual price guides and how-to
sources on collecting. An introduction gives an overview of the
types and techniques of collections and collecting, as well as the
arrangement of the essays. The 12 new essays and one reprinted
essay are grouped into four basic themes: collecting in a virtual
world, relationships between collector and their collections,
collecting as a reflection of identity (both personal and
political), and how collecting practices relate to cultural
development. The essay topics range from whimsical to sobering
(i.e., from toys to Nazi propaganda), from the curiosity cabinets
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the more modern MP3
files. Each essay is followed by a bibliography and some are
enhanced with illustrations. There is an index and information
about the essay contributors at the end. This is an interesting
examination of collections and collecting that would serve as a
beginning place for scholarly research.
*American Reference Books Annual*
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