Most collectors do not just collect one thing. The core collection, whatever it is, is usually the symptom of a far more chronic malaise. The sickness spreads itself throughout a life like a shattered windscreen, and before one realises there are clusters of things all over.
A few years ago I began to seek out other people who collected, and to talk to staff at auction houses, who collected people who collected. This began modestly by talking to those who collected and sold rock and pop memorabilia. This was a relatively new pursuit, and it was the classic example of collecting without being aware of it. There is only a short step from owning a pile of records and CDs that you bought in a shop to actively seeking out rare recordings by a favoured artist or test pressings and acetates. The collectors' market for records gathered pace in the 1970s with picture sleeves and coloured vinyl; record companies realised what the Royal Mail had realised years before—that if you printed the same thing in multiple editions (for miniature sheets and booklets read coloured vinyl and 12-inch remixes), the smitten would buy duplicates.
The reason John Lennon's stamp album could be offered for £30,000 was because it contained several signatures, and Beatles signatures were the consistently hot item at the pop culture auctions. A good set that sold for £250 in the early 1980s went for £3,000 twenty years later. Many of these were hot in another sense, and Hillary Kay from Sotheby's and the Antiques Roadshow told me that before they can auction another signed copy of the White Album the item is sent to a man in Florida who can tell with a glance whether the autographs are 'good' or not, much like David Brandon with stamps. 'He will say, "Lennon and Ringo are good, but the others are wrong," or, "Only Paul's is really Paul, all the others are done by a secretary or machine."'
After rock memorabilia I started meeting people who collected famous sporting items—programmes, medals, trophies, match-worn shirts. This too is a fairly new area for the bigger auction houses, boosted by two things: the desire of older well-known sportsmen to handle debt and old taxes by selling their career highlights, and fans who once dreamed of emulating their heroes now finding they can bid for their trophies; they are not only buying reflected glory—sportsmen with mementoes won with the utmost endeavour selling to City boys with the utmost Christmas bonus—but also part of their youth.
I came across a man called David Convery in a crowded vault at Christie's in New Bond Street, and wherever he stepped he was surrounded by collectible items from upcoming sales. There were football objects in cardboard boxes next to tennis rackets and signed boxing gloves, and these were not far from German teddy bears and Beatles wigs and a Corgi James Bond gold Aston Martin DB5 in near-mint box with fully working ejector seat. It was hard to decide whether these collections were a priceless part of our cultural heritage or melancholy junk, or both, but it was clear that something new was happening to the value of our souvenirs.
Convery was a Scot with the sort of robust frame unsuited to most sports except fishing and darts. I met him when he was in his early thirties, and during his short adult life he has seen something interesting happen to the market in football memorabilia. In the summer of 1989 he was working in the Scottish Art department at Christie's Glasgow branch when it was decided to hold a specialist football sale. This was the first time a major auction house had attempted such a thing; annual auctions of cricket and golfing items were popular, but they dealt mostly with pre-war items and the buyers were a small band of well-heeled men with an obsessive interest in Scottish links and the 'bodyline' Ashes series. Football medals and old programmes were occasionally tacked on to these sales, or featured in general auctions, but the thought of a dedicated sale was often regarded as too working-class to attract sufficient funds. In the first auction, the gems included an 1897–8 England v. Scotland cap awarded to Ernest Needham of Sheffield United (which went for £620) and the football used in the 1903 Scottish Cup final (£480). There was also a lot of attic stuff—wooden rattles, faded photographs—and it all helped to push the total to £45,179. A year later, the next sale in Glasgow made £48,873. But in 1991, as news of the new market spread to players and collectors, the total came to £126,730. Fourteen years later, the sale of one item—the second FA Cup, used between 1896 and 1910—was sold for almost four times that total, for £488,000.
In the basement, Convery pointed out a cardboard box containing a rare football shirt. He let me take it out, unfold it, and pose with it as he took my photograph; it was the shirt worn by Pelé in the 1970 World Cup final in Mexico. In fact, it was probably one of three shirts worn by Pelé in that match. He had one at the start of the game, almost certainly changed at half-time because of the heat, and then wore yet another when he went up to get his winner's medal. I was holding the second shirt.
Its value was uncertain, as few comparable items had come up for auction before. In September 2000, the shirt Geoff Hurst had worn in the 1966 final went for £80,000, but that was considered to be a freak result: the hat-trick shirt, a feat never equalled. Pelé's jersey—yellow with green trim, number 10, still mud-stained—was worn in one of the greatest finals ever held, by the greatest player the world had ever seen. He scored the first goal in Brazil's 4–1 victory over Italy, a triumph that displayed such unfettered artistry that the memory of it makes mature people tearful. At the end of the match, half the defeated Italian team displayed one unexpected character trait: not despair, but ambition—they all wanted Pelé's shirt. Roberto Rosato, the defender, got to it first, and owned it for thirty-one years. And then in November 2006 a Christie's employee received an email from Rosato's daughter. Carola Rosato explained that her father's English wasn't so good, and she was making an enquiry on his behalf: would they be interested in selling the Pelé shirt? The first thought at the auction house was scepticism; perhaps it was a wind-up; perhaps the shirt was a fake. Carola Rosato then emailed some detailed photographs, and Christie's began to get excited. 'The key details gave it away,' David Convery told me. 'The badge, the stitching, the label—"Umbro World Cup Choice—Made in England".'
Convery did some further research, met Rosato in England, and became convinced that he had the genuine article. He decided on an estimate of £30,000–£50,000, and resolved to put it on the cover of the next catalogue. The key was the provenance; a bidder's mind would be put at rest that this really was the shirt Pelé had worn for the second half of the game (Convery estimated that the third shirt he wore—because he didn't want to pick up his medal half-naked—would be worth only a few thousand). But the true value of the shirt lay in its story, the yarn that linked it beyond fame to history. As with the Blue Mauritius, worth lay in the ability to say who touched it first and where it had been. We like to feel we are in touch with our past, and that we may for a while control its future.
On Roberto Rosato's big day, the main attraction was displayed on a mannequin in a tall glass case to the auctioneer's right, but was removed from its cabinet at about 11.40. 'Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, coming to lot 114 now, Pelé's 1970 World Cup shirt, and I will open the bidding at £20,000. Thank you, 22,000, 25,000, 28,000, on my left here, 30,000...' And so it went, swiftly reaching £75,000. At £80,000 there was a slight lull, but then a man standing at the back of the hall began taking on a buyer on the phone. The bid rose to £120,000, then £140,000. It helped that the auction was taking place in the same year as the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, boosting Asian soccer fever. 'Are you all done?' the auctioneer asked. '£140,000. Selling on the telephone at £140,000. Fair warning.' The hall drew a collective breath as the gavel descended, and many scribbled the sum in their catalogues, thus spoiling their resale value in future auctions. With commission, the total would come to £157,000, the highest price ever paid for a football shirt.
Outside the saleroom, a member of Christie's staff who spoke Italian called Rosato on his cellphone. Rosato was more than pleased. He kept asking, 'Are you sure?'
The buyer said he wished to remain anonymous—the buyer could have been a she, but not rea
lly—so we do not know whether the Pelé shirt was part of a collection that also included shirts by worn by Puskas, Eusebio and Maradona, or whether it was a one-off. But if it was a one-off, I find it hard to see how the purchaser would have been happy with that. I feel sure he is a collector now, bitten by something great and eager for more.
***
To make me feel a little bit better—a bit saner—about my desire for stamps, I began to hunt down people who collected things that were stranger. I read about a man called Ken Tye who collected light bulbs. Tye was writing a history of early incandescent light, and he considered himself the leading collector in Britain. He had about fifteen hundred bulbs and, the nature of this strange and fragile passion aside, seemed to be fairly normal. He did, for instance, often light up his bulbs to admire their beauty; others would regard this as sacrilege, just as collectors of rare records would never dream of actually playing them. But Tye loved the varying glows from the different filaments—the carbonised vegetable material that appeared in Edison's day at the end of the nineteenth century, the tantalum drawn wire and then tungsten that characterised bulbs from the early twentieth century. Tye wore quite large smoked glasses and had a round balding head, and he looked like he was turning into a light bulb himself, the way owners come to resemble their pets. I'd like to think this was a common trait—the collectors of Bernard Leach pottery soon looking brown and earthy, and collectors of antiquarian books appearing dank and troubled by their spines.
Certainly when I met a man called Lucifer in rural Sussex in 2006, he did look like someone who used to consume considerable amounts of acid. Lucifer was in his early thirties and collected blotting paper. Not the sort of blotting paper favoured by Dickensian scribes, but the sort used by the manufacturers of LSD in the last three decades or so to get their product to the market. More precisely he is a collector and designer of blotter art, and a former user of the molecules they were designed to contain. These days his collection is entirely clean and artistic, and it is a beautiful thing.
Lucifer told me that before LSD was made illegal in the mid-1960s, psychoanalysts and recreationists could get their drugs in several ways. Large pills were popular, as were infused sugar cubes. After proscription, the length of a jail term for possession was based on the weight of the LSD delivery method, and so the smart set looked for lighter ways to distribute their hits. Gelatin was tried for a while, but nothing proved as popular as thin absorbent paper; the acid could be dropped onto marked portions dose by dose, or an entire sheet could be dipped and then broken up.
Even users without heightened powers of perception soon began to notice that their individual hits had little logos on them. Pyramids and shields were popular at first, and then cartoon characters and strawberries. These motifs served a dual purpose: they signified the strength of dose, and they signified the doser. It was branding for hippies: proud LSD labs wished to establish their credentials as drug-makers you could trust. The early sheets of blotting paper were torn freestyle, but soon perforations ensured a better split and equality of high. By the late 1960s, some sheets of blotter art only began to make sense when seen as a whole design—a novel counter-culture art-form that lost its integrity as soon as someone tore a bit off and put it in their mouth.
Lucifer told me that Lucifer was his birth name and he didn't much trust surnames. When I arrived at his house, which he shared with three other creatives, one of whom was his girlfriend Twinkle, the first question he asked me was whether I'd like some chocolate. This turned out not to be Cadbury's, but a home-made brick kept in the fridge that contained cocoa beans from jungles and rare fruits and spices and something else. I had visions of never finding my way home. I had a small piece, and it was strong and delicious. He told me that an overnight guest was once staying with him who raided the fridge in the middle of the night and ate large amounts of this special chocolate and it took her one day to remember who she was and one week to recover.
Lucifer used to be a road traveller, but is now predominantly a spiritual traveller. He is also an eBay trader, and has sold many famous designs of blotter art and some of his own. He told me that his interest began in the second summer of love in the late 1980s, and since then he had amassed a varied and valuable collection. As Twinkle brought us tea with twigs in it, he showed me three albums' worth of historical images, each perforated into 900 or 1,000 squares. Obviously they reminded me of small sheets of stamps, albeit the sort that could mail you to another universe.
'The first sheet I saw complete was this Timothy Leary Profile,' he said as he unsheathed a highly complex multicoloured design incorporating many visual interpretations of the teachings of the pro-LSD psychology professor. 'It has the skull and crossbones on his shoulder and musical notes coming out of his ear. It has the SMILE theory in the background—Space Migration equals Intelligent Life Extension. I think it was 1995, and I was at a rave site before the rave had started. There was a sofa around a fire, and I sat on that and someone turned up with a new sheet that had just been dipped and it was this one. People held it and went, "Wow!" You could feel the energy from it through your fingertips.'
In those days, each tab cost Lucifer between 50p and £3.50, depending on market forces and strength. He remembers that certain parts of certain sheets were stronger than others. Sometimes they were held up by a top corner after the dipping, so that the LSD would drip to the bottom or a corner. 'On the Timothy Leary I was told that the sheet was dipped again just on the skull and crossbones.'
Lucifer drifted into the rave scene from skateboarding and high-adrenaline sports, but stopped using LSD in his early twenties. 'I felt that it wasn't safe enough. Every person that touches a dipped sheet adds their energy to it. I had taken various ones that had led me to negative perceptions. Not really a bad trip as such, but I had believed that the whole point was to reach some awakening or bliss, and I was missing that when I received heavy hallucinations and strange sounds. I was almost experiencing someone else's life history.' By then he had already begun to think that his future in the blotter art scene lay not as a consumer but as a creator and collector. 'This is The Simpsons,' he said as he flicked through his plastic folders. A well-thumbed and underlined copy of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell lay by the cushions on which we sat. 'And this is a Beavis and Butt-head, and the Hendrix, and Easy Rider, and the Dancing Skeletons. And the famous Alice through the Looking Glass, which is double-sided.'
He gave me one of his own designs, an intense mixture of symbols representing ancient tribal beliefs, Kabbalistic languages and swirling celestial bodies. I told him I collected stamps, which also had perforations, so there was a neat link there, and his eyes drifted away. He was too polite to say it, but I sensed his meaning was, 'Now who's the strange one?' The printing of his blotter art was complex, he explained. 'There are 147 separate layers to enhance the clarity. I send them on a disc to someone in England, and then when this person has enough designs he books a ticket to America, goes over for the weekend, waits to see them printed, and then comes back with fifty copies of each design. I'm not sure where he goes in America. There are certain bits of information I'm happy not knowing.'
Lucifer acknowledges a certain risk attached to his calling. 'People can get rather alarmed if they just see all these sheets lying around. The police use a UV lamp—it will glow if LSD is present, and the lamp will also destroy it. But if you're a collector it's best to have them framed on the wall.' He has recently begun to sell blotters on the website he runs with friends called Hunab Ku ( www.hunabku.biz). This site, which emerged from a shop in Glastonbury, has been some time in the making, but since fixing 'the time dilation components there is less chaotic flux emanating from the crystalline source'.
Lucifer is fairly new to the game. His enthusiasms run counter to the popular belief that the collecting generation is ageing and not being replaced. He speaks with awe of fellow designers and collectors Rick Sinnett, Alex Grey and James Clements, but in particu
lar he admires the work of Mark McCloud, the creator of the Alice blotter and many more. McCloud, who lives in San Francisco and has been busted and acquitted twice for his suspicious-looking hobby, runs what he calls the Institute of Illegal Images. This is by far the largest blotter art collection in the world, with many unique items surviving not as sheets but only as single tabs. McCloud now sells art-print enlargements of the more iconic images for $1,000 each, including The Mighty Quinn (an Eskimo looking out to sea), The Sorcerer's Apprentice (thought to have been dosed with LSD from Albert Hofmann's own laboratory), Snoopy (featuring the dog in shades with what McCloud has described as 'an illegal smile'), and Gorbachev ('This is the Gorby that brought the Berlin Wall down!').
McCloud is blotter art's archivist, but there has yet to be an official catalogue establishing rarity and pricing structure, and the collecting market has yet to be tested by a major auction house. As with all valuable artefacts, there is also an emerging and convincing line in forgeries. Lucifer said there were about twenty serious collectors in the UK, but he was concerned that not all of them knew how to spot a genuine Dancing Skeletons from an impostor.
Not so long ago we seemed to be content to collect the things that made sense, the things that were in the game What Am I Bid? I once played with my dad. The Chippendale chair, the Sheraton bureau, the Ming vase, the Meissen dog. The things they had in common were that they were beautiful, useful or both. It's unlikely that the people from the Tang dynasty argued over whether their work was 'a design classic', or even whether their efforts would one day be collected. But now we seem to collect anything, or claim that two or more of anything is a collection. I tried to think what was the most absurd thing one could collect with deliberation and passion, beyond offspring or money. Butterflies, the first-day covers of the Edwardians; fossils, the Victorian craze; and before then tulips, the madness for which sprung up in the first half of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands and was later mirrored in the orchid mania of the 1980s—these were fads that had a certain logic to them, based either on ephemera or permanence, and upon our appreciation of beauty and diversity. The great naturalists collected specimens to prove their points.
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