Collections of nothing / William Davies King.

Nearly everyone collects something, even those who donʹt think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing -- and a lot of it. Captivated by the detritus of everyday life, King has spent a lifetime gathering a monumental mass of miscellany, from cereal boxes to boulders to broken folding chairs. Junk, you might call it -- and so might King, at times. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate. Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. Philatelismʹs long-standing rules governing the care and display of collections soon proved an oppressive burden in the midst of the family chaos generated by his sisterʹs growing mental illness; choosing to ignore the rules, King began to handle and display his collection according to his own desires -- the first step in his search for an unexplored, individual meaning in collecting. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value.