“To collect” – early 15c., “gather into one place or group” (transitive), from Old French collecter “to collect” (late 14c.), from Latin collectus, past participle of colligere “gather together,” from assimilated form of com “together” (see com-) + legere “to gather,” from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather.” The intransitive sense “gather together, accumulate” is attested from 1794.
“Collector” – from Late Latin collector, agent noun from colligere “to gather together”. Meaning “one who collects objects of interest as a pursuit or amusement” is by 1774. Fem. form collectress is attested from 1825.
We collect things. We collect stories, ideas, myths, opinions, rancour, dreams, ambitions, cinema tickets, concert bracelets, posters, flyers, paintings, lighters, matches & pins, journals & postcards, photos & stones, sticks & meanings. They keep us together.
That’s how the Glitch Library began, in the end: with a collection of books and beautiful findings, a gathering of minds and an opening of doors. Art and design to bind us together, stories and pages to bring us back to ourselves.
We hold on to these collections, they give us a short respite from the lack of poetry of everyday life — the place where things are just that: things. But for the collector things are always more than what they seem. They’re soulful avatars of a rich life, of a chance at an afterlife, of pieces of lives cut, glued, bent and kept together. And even when they get lost and thrown in a movers’ truck to end up in a thrift store somewhere, they’re never truly gone. They’ll find a collector dreaming of giving them a home, in an adoring act of care and vicarious living.
Like the space on Via della Viola, a small street nestled in the historic centre of Perugia, where Giancarlo Baronti, former anthropologist and teacher, opened a window display in a former hairdresser’s space. There he selects themes and orchestrates scenographies of traditions, old books, instruments and posters, menus from the 20s blending with the vibrant restaurants nearby; saints and their stories, rituals of forgotten lands or, sometimes, just a note saying “When I’ll have time”. A quiet performance from a man who will never call himself an artist, but who chose to open a window onto the world and keep a communication line still flickering.
Then there are virtual homes like Conceptual Art Ephemera and Art Books Ephemera. Or repurposed places, like the Edicola 518, a former newsstand in front of the Sant Ercolano church in Perugia, turned into a temple for beautiful paper things.
There’s only new editions here, but a collection to be reckoned with, nonetheless. Niche magazines, self published anarchic experiments, books on the town’s quirky characters, collections of hand painted street signs in India, torn posters or flyers from rave parties in the 90s — they’ve all found their place in this poetic paradise.
Unassuming places can also hold plenty of wonder and surprise: take Gussago, for example, a town of around 16.000 people in a region more famous for bubbly wines than books, where Studio Bruno Tonini (a bookstore and research space focusing on modern and contemporary artistic movements) hosts numerous books & thousands of artists’ invitations and ephemera. From Beuys to Kosuth, from Alighiero Boetti to Thomas Schütte, the list — and possibilities, seems endless.
Our collective imagination thrives and counts on our ability to collect. After all, everything we know about the world comes in collections. From fossils to bones, from pottery to jewels, from manuscripts to mosaics: we’ve pieced our history — natural, personal or global, from records and traces, from gathering & cataloguing proof of life left by the previous tenants of our civilization.
The very term “to recollect” binds memory and collecting in a dance of forever: “to recover or recall knowledge of, bring back to the mind or memory,” 1550s, from Latin recollectus, past participle of recolligere “to take up again, regain,” etymologically “to collect again,” from re- “again” + colligere “gather” (see collect (v.)).”
And if we are to go all the way back to the old Greeks, Aristotle made this distinction, as pointed out by Southey in “Omniana”: “Beasts and babies remember, i. e. recognize : man alone recollects.” And since we’re in Ancient territory, we can’t leave without mentioning those fantastic Etruscan or Egyptian tombs. They say a lot about humanity’s attachment to objects and symbols — both during this life and in whatever lies beyond it. One might almost suspect that these meaningful things work as in-betweeners, like some magical tokens that help us cross worlds and keep us whole between cycles of being.
Pharaohs might’ve needed them to live a life of richness and luxury even beyond death. We need them to (re)connect with loved ones, old stories and forgotten times – ultimately always bridging worlds and meanings. Leaving traces and stepping in the traces left by others, gently playing in the dust of time.
And who better to incorporate and breathe life into these objects than artists, our eternal witnesses and actors, the ones who dare put a mirror in front of society and reflect, distort, connect, contort and challenge our vision of ourselves. Everything they touch becomes important memorabilia, signs of an era, thoughts and feelings captured and sheltered from time.
That’s why collecting books, magazines and artists’ books is a heroic act of visionary folly. An anachronism of sorts, especially in our day and age, when we’ve been hearing false prophets declaring print dead for quite some time now. And instead here it is, thriving, hydrated, in its lane — in collections big or small around the world. You can find it on a stroll through the centre of The Hague, where photo and artists’ book custodian Peter van Beveren (1952) continues his relentless adoration and diffusion of modern and contemporary art through The Archives library, “a private collection of modern & contemporary art books, artist’s books, photobooks, and ephemeral materials”. In the early 70s he was a conceptual artist himself, developing his passion for collecting & sending mail art, whereas now he welcomes all obsessive dreamers to his haven of thousands of books & archive materials inside Billytown. Why? Because as he mentions on the library’s Instagram page, “BOOKS ARE WEAPONS IN THE WAR OF IDEAS”.
The Hague is also the home of The Alphabetum (part of the West international art gallery), an artistic space exploring “the formative and formal aspects of language” and how they can blend, mix and communicate, getting typographers and writers to meet and aiming to prove their indelible link. “A letter is a letter because it resembles a letter; and because it resembles a letter it is a letter.” They have an impressive catalogue and one of their latest exhibitions, “L’écriture avant la lettre”, investigated the very underlying structure of language, presenting 26 forms of ‘Performance Lectures’, where spoken, written and performed language took centerstage. From Walter Benjamin lectures to works of outsiders and activists or contemporary artists, no letter was left unturned.
Print is also alive and well in the pristine Umbrian hills, in Frigolandia, the self proclaimed Republic of Fantasy and the land of Frigidaire, one of Italy’s most impactful and iconic comics magazines in the 80s, both a place and an idea, kept alive by the most ardent and fearless of dreamers. The essence of their project? To create something never seen before, a centre of cosmopolitan artistic initiatives and production hidden in the forests of Umbria, a place where craft and innovation not only coexist, but thrive. And of course, a place hosting a collection of rare magazines (including Frigidaire), posters, newspapers and ephemera to keep you dreaming forever.
Then there’s the Olympus of art-infused paper: Printed Matter, “the world’s leading non-profit organisation dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books and related publications.” Initially established in Tribeca by a group of people working in the arts, including artist Sol LeWitt and critic Lucy Lippard, Printed Matter started as a publisher of artists’ books, exploring books as an artistic medium with large-edition and economically produced publications to encourage play & experimentation outside the standard, museum/gallery system. In an interview with artist Julie Ault, Lucy Lippard recalls how somebody wrote about “the page as an alternative space” – a space where artists could be more in control and talk to a larger audience.
Back then, artists’ books were not seen with the reverence they’ve attained in more recent years, on the contrary — they were given as freebies by art dealers, but Printed Matter changed all that and saw them for what they were: complex & meaningful artworks, a reflection of their times and their respective artistic practices. Now their online catalogue hosts around 45.000 titles, an analog ocean displayed online, where different textures, various voices and curious hues all unite, humbly, in print.
Then I recall meeting curator & friend Larisa Oancea and French artist Tiane Doan na Champassak for his exhibition in Turin, “Censored”, where he used some of the hundreds of Thai erotic magazines from the 60s and the 70s that he had gathered. Needless to say we went to the Balon, Turin’s huge flea market and he got out of there a very happy man, with quite a few old films (and new obsessions) to develop. Nowadays they both focus on artists’ books related exhibitions, moving Studio 454 from Venice to the South of France and living the thrill of discovery with far-flung gems, Ed Ruscha artist books and unfolding cities in tiny, precious books. I envy them, no doubt, and not just for their studio’s location.
There’s also Revue Profane, a French independent magazine waltzing between art and collecting, truly experimental stuff and self-taught amateurs. Their heroes? The people who love to do things, who do them passionately, obsessively, who live for beauty and search for meaning far from the public eye. Or Elizabeth Godspeed’s “occasional newsletter”, Casual Archivist, where the multidisciplinary artist, art director and US Editor-at-large for It’s Nice That dives into design history one different collection at a time: from ephemera to packaging, from printed matter to editorial design.
A few years back you could’ve stepped into a very special nocturnal space called Faust, in Turin, where author, creative director and book collector Gianluigi Ricuperati decided to honour his biggest obsessions. From dawn till dusk, this night shop for insomniacs and rare books aficionados would host oddities, talks or auctions for its many treasures (including the first French edition of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967). Alessandro Bava (artist, editor and architect) had designed the space, including a terrarium of leaf insects living on a book tree, a livable work of art & a literary caffe for ghosts & spirits, as they called it at the time (2018). I’ll let you remember what happened 2 years later to guess why it closed.
The list of holy places for avid readers can go on endlessly, from unassuming small towns to big, bustling cultural hubs, driven by the same deep-seated need for paper-delivered transcendence. It spreads like an underground network of resilient fungi, pulsating with the collective knowledge and inspiration of generations: even when some close, even when reality hits the dreamer with a slap of bad luck, there’s always room for possibility. Because this is what these places signify: courage, possibility, laughing in the face of the mundane with the knowledge — not the hope, nor the faith — the knowledge that there is something more than this. And that something can always be found within the pages of a book.
