I bought my first LEGO set when I was 8, and I bought my last LEGO set when I was 18. During that intervening decade and the hundreds of treks to LEGO Stores I took during it, I never seriously thought of my collection as a collection. I never bought the latest Darth Vader variant just for the sake of having it; I bought it because of the ways I could play with it. Looking back now that I’m a bit detached from that era of purchasing, I’m left to grapple with the idea that many people do buy things just for the sake of having them.
In the beginning of his nearly hour-and-a-half YouTube video titled “Massive LEGO Collection Tour: Over 6,000 Sets and 15,000 Minifigs!,” the US-based streamer DuckBricks walks through the large area of his private residence that he dedicated to his LEGO collection. Thousands of framed items adorn the walls, massive cities and landscapes dwarf the tables and shelves built just to hold them, and, most strikingly, spaceships suspend from the ceiling as though mounted in a museum display.
According to DuckBricks, real name Christopher Lee, the museum-esque mood was not accidental. Throughout the unscripted 80 minutes, he explains the significance of each of his items, how they were acquired, and their relation to the LEGO toy brand with all the knowledge of a curator. While it’s difficult to explain to people unfamiliar with collector culture how or why to stick around for movie-length home tours, I cannot help but spend at least a few of those rare, coveted late-night binging sessions listening, enthralled, to the stories and memories the collection evokes inside the mind of the collector.
At the end of the video, DuckBricks cites the database Brickset as ranking his collection among the largest 15 in the world. Yes, Duckbricks’ collection might be an outlier in size, but the same stereotype of crowded spaces jammed with stuff holds true for collectors pretty much across the board, regardless of the stuff they collect.
SOME PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF HAVING STUFF. THEY’RE AFRAID OF COMMITMENT, TERRIFIED OF BAGGAGE. THEY LIKE TO GAWK WHEN THEY SEE OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF.
In Nashville, my city, there’s one person who knows collecting more than just about anyone. His name is John, and he owns the local sports card shop. Over the years, John’s shop became a local mecca of sorts. For many, it was a fastidious tradition “to bring your kids and spend an hour,” according to John’s friends. Not even to buy, but to revel in the “vibes, aura, and feel.” Shops-turned-museums like the one owned by John have, for years, been the last surviving bastions in the war against minimalism.
And it is truly a war, as John might not own his store for much longer. He woke up one morning last month to news of fire, fire. “They found two wires that had been burnt and the coverings of the wires were taken off. The cash register was melted.” “This store has been my livelihood for 40 years and it’s been a lot of good,” John told reporters. “You wouldn’t think that this little store could have flames that big, but they were that big.” John says his store had been broken into a lot for years before the fire, to the point that it prevented him from qualifying for insurance. Now, his only hope is Gofundme.
In the mainstream, collecting gets a bad rap. True, the pandemic might be killing minimalism (good riddance), but even after a forced multi-year hiatus from house partying, my guests still wrinkle their noses at my ‘88 Star Wars action figures on the shelf, my coins, my stamps, in short anything that isn’t sterile and dull. And while I know that having a pristinely decluttered house is an almost impossible standard to achieve, it is nonetheless the standard.
I think the problem is that some people are afraid of having stuff. They’re afraid of commitment, terrified of baggage. They like to gawk when they see other people’s stuff. They gawked at John and my local sports card shop. DuckBricks knew they would gawk, so he made a museum. BrickStar made a museum too, come to think of it. But the gawkers miss the point of it all. Collecting is not about the stuff. It’s about the knowledge, the memories, the finding. It’s about stewarding everything worth remembering. In a world dominated by the realm of the clickable, warehouses no longer hold crates of archives as the Indiana Jones saga reminds us they once did. Now new data warehouses hold hard drives and servers, full of NFTs (empty shells of what once was stuff). Collectors seem to be the only ones who have enough sense to shun the clickable and appreciate the touchable. We need more of that.