![]() It's probably true for all collectors and it might raise some eyebrows, if not actual hackles. First, you should know that Benjamin says this other thing. Maybe it was lying forgotten in a dusty corner of an antique shop.Īlex Chambers: And nostalgia for the period in life when objects could glow with meaning, like a comic book collector being taken back to that childhood excitement of falling into a superhero story. Nostalgia for the moment they found the object. But I think that's part of what a collector is doing. Nostalgia isn't something you normally create on purpose. It looks like books on your shelves but it's nostalgia. For Benjamin, you collect your collecting memories. And dreaming, it turns out, can be a kind of comfort. But, surrounded by all those books, I could dream. I wanted to write books or make radio but I was short on ideas. Benjamin said collecting connected him with the past.Īaron Cain (Voice of Walter Benjamin): There is a Spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions.Īlex Chambers: I don't remember the moment that copy of Catch 22 came into my hands, but that book does bring me back to the store and the months I worked there. The essay is called Unpacking My Library and it sounds like he was actually surrounded by boxes of books shelves empty and waiting when he sat down and wrote it. Was it connected to being a Jew in Germany in those first decades of the twentieth century? He wrote an essay about book collecting and he didn't answer that question. I might even look at it again in another couple of years.Īlex Chambers: Benjamin understood that desire to hold and to have a particular book. But as satisfying as it is to talk about the steal, collecting isn't about the money. According to the Internet, this copy might be worth a couple hundred dollars now. This Catch 22 has a red cover with a cartoon-like drawing of a giant hand whose thumb is pressing down on a man's head while the man thumbs his nose back at the hand. They're small, easy to hold in your hands. Those modern library editions are so satisfying. Maybe you've even collected a few special editions yourself.Īlex Chambers: Years ago, I worked at a used book store and a modern library edition of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 came through. Maybe you too wanted to live in a library when you grew up. ![]() Maybe like me, you've loved books your whole life. But if you ever collected baseball cards or Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, maybe you have an inkling. Maybe that's a little hard to connect with if you're not a collector like he was. One time, not long before France fell to the Third Reich, he almost traded his five volume collected works of Franz Kafka for a few first editions of Kafka's early writings. Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and writer in the first half of the twentieth century. That's all coming up on Inner States, right after this.Īlex Chambers: By all accounts, Walter Benjamin was a pretty obsessive book collector. Then we talk with Bill Carroll who's using the quantitative skills he developed as a Chemist to analyze the billboard charts of the 1960s and 70s. This week on Inner States, Malcolm MMobutu Smith on finding that diamond in the rough. It's got white controls, atmosphere controls, safes and other things in it.Īlex Chambers: And I've got to say, that dedication it's something akin to love. Malcolm Mobutu Smith: We have a room dedicated to it. ![]() ![]() Alex Chambers: Malcolm takes his comic book collecting very seriously. ![]()
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