Specimens
Feast of Saint Vincent of Zaragoza
Collectors of All Kinds Showcase Their Work
About Specimens
Today we salute the keepers of order in a chaotic world: the collectors, curators, archivists, and enthusiasts who spend years, sometimes lifetimes, assembling small kingdoms of meaning. Specimens is a day to honor the compulsion to categorize and preserve. Bottle caps, butterflies, rare coins, vintage action figures, obsolete software, peculiar taxidermy, underground zines, Picasso etchings, and pristine Beanie Babies all qualify. If someone has labeled it, cataloged it, or built a shrine to it, we count it among the worthy. You may participate as a visitor (admiring others’ troves), as a humble collector, or as a fullfledged curator (presenting your life’s work with reverent delight). Host a mini exhibition on your bookshelf. Post a “Specimen of the Day” every day for a month on Instagram. Indulge a collecting habit, or begin one, even if it’s nothing more than a jar filled with especially charming pebbles. Today we celebrate the objects and the people who love them fiercely enough to sort them into color-coded Tupperware.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Start a collection. Don’t know how? Choose one object in your home and label it: Specimen A.
(B) Recommended
Create a mini-exhibition. Lay out your favorite collection—no matter how small or strange—and invite friends or family to view it. Serve wine or juice.
(C) High effort
Start (or finish) the holy quest: the missing piece, the grail item, the final link in the chain. Spend too much on it. Frame it. Light a candle. You are complete.
Inspiration
I’ve always been a collector. As a kid, I gathered stamps, rocks, kites, pencils, marbles, candy wrappers, comics, magnets, matchboxes, seashells, and the wonderfully garish paper wrappers that used to hold cheap fireworks. As an adult, not much has changed, though my tastes are more esoteric and my budget a little more forgiving: early Blues 78s, vintage televisions, and Dresden Christmas ornaments. The objects have evolved, but the instinct remains. Collect- ing gives shape to a certain manic energy I might otherwise squander in the name of being “productive.” It’s the same impulse that fuels this book, a desire to order beautiful things in beautiful ways. Specimens falls on the Feast of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, the patron saint of archivists and librarians. Collectors are like archivists but (how to put this gently?) motivated by a special, sometimes fun disorder in their brains. They rescue oddities, preserve fragments, and impose logic on chaos with nothing more than a label-maker and a dream. What drives someone to gather every tin toy from the 1930s? Or to alphabetize an entire wall of jazz LPs, original sleeves only? The often false belief that it must be done, and the flat-out lie that it is fulfilling.
Adornments
Watch
Finding Vivian Maier (2013)
A revelatory documentary that unearths the life’s work of Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny who secretly amassed over 100,000 photographs in her lifetime. The film unfolds like a detective story, as boxes of Maier’s negatives—long hidden in storage—are discovered and painstakingly curated by a young enthusiast.
Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)
Alain Resnais’s short documentary (translated as “All the World’s Memory”) peers into the labyrinth of France’s national library and emerges as a poetic reflection on humanity’s fight against forgetfulness.
Read
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
A lush novel of love and obsession in which every cigarette butt, thimble, and movie ticket becomes a sacred artifact. Pamuk follows Kemal, an affluent Istanbul man who, after losing the woman he adores, begins obsessively collecting objects related to their fleeting affair.
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
Part reportage, part philosophical inquiry, this enchanting nonfiction book explores one of the strangest museums in America to ask why we collect.
Unpacking My Library by Walter Benjamin
A slim but seminal essay in which the German philosopher reflects on the act of unboxing his personal collection of books after moving.