Vsauce!
Kevin here.
At the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York City.
Visited by a record 6.3 million people last year to look at a rotating collection of over
1.5 million pieces ranging from Mesopotamian cylinder seals to King Henry VIII’s personal
armor.
20% of the total collection, 306,353 items were collected by one person, Jefferson Burdick.
But why would he do that?
Why do people collect things?
Autographs, Barf bags, Cards, Dolls, Erasers, Fabergé Eggs, Gum, Hair, Ink, Jokers, Knives,
Lunch boxes, Miniature Chairs, Nails, Oil, Perfume bottles, Quilts, Rocks, Soap, Toothbrushes,
Umbrella covers, Video Games, Wine labels, X-men, Yo-Yos, Zippos.
What is a collection?
Is it just acquiring stuff, or is it a carefully selected, curated assembly around a particular
theme?
Is your memory a collection of thoughts?
Is living just collecting memories?
Are your thoughts a collection of you?
Well, maybe.
But Psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger defined a collection as, “the selecting, gathering,
and keeping of objects of subjective value.”
For Jefferson R. Burdick, it was cards.
Born in 1900, Burdick grew up with the dawn of photography and mass-printed illustrations,
with halftone printing technology allowing for the reproduction of complex images.
Picture cards were inserted into consumer products, like pouches of tobacco, to bolster
brand awareness.
A generation before television beamed moving pictures into the living room, Burdick and
his friends were captivated by the brilliantly colored chromolithographs printed on thin
cardboard stock . Saying, “Practically every small boy saved these kinds of cards.
We made our dads use certain brands whether they liked them or not.”
The most popular icons to grace product insert cards came from baseball, a game that took
the United States by storm in the wake of the Civil War.
By the 1900’s, America’s cities fielded teams to play a game that helped unify a divided
country.
From Boston to St. Louis, regional competition was channeled through sports, and advertisers
leveraged the popularity of the game and its stars to promote their products.
In 1889, kids in Boston fought over the Old Judge Cigarettes picture card of the Boston
Beaneaters’ Mike “King” Kelly, and in 1909 boys in Pittsburgh watched their fathers
open pouches from the American Tobacco Company to see if their favorite Pirate -- Honus Wagner
-- would emerge.
Wagner, who reportedly didn’t want his picture associated with marketing cigarettes to children,
pulled his card from production.
With fewer than 60 known to exist, one of them sold at auction in 2013 for $2.1 million.
But during Burdick’s lifetime, all of these cards were basically worthless, and a 1933
Goudey Babe Ruth that could sell for $250,000 today was not significantly more valuable
than an 1891 Allen & Ginter Golden-Pencilled Hamburgh chicken.
In 1961, two years before his death, Burdick valued that Holy Grail T-206 Wagner card at
just fifty bucks.
But wasn’t about the money, it was about the collection.
He spent a lifetime amassing not only 30,000 baseball cards, but hundreds of thousands
of postcards, tobacco and baker cards ranging from champion women swimmers to perilous occupations
and depictions of jokes.
In the developing era of cheap mass-production, Burdick collected and cataloged virtually
every type of card printed -- centuries before, the Marind people of South New Guinea were
collecting human heads.
They believed skulls, along with other objects, contained a sacred life-force known as mana.
Invisible power capable of soothing insecurity, anxiety and feelings of vulnerability.
Mana is the magic that human belief imbues in objects, whether it’s a religious relic
embodying the power of a deity, a dreamcatcher to filter nightmares, or picture cards that
could teleport Jefferson Burdick back to his youth.
Humans add meaning to objects and search for solace, safety and security in them -- which
might just come with the territory of being born.
Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, believed that collecting stems from a collective
unconscious “nut and berries” behavior inherited from our hunter/gatherer ancestors.
Father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud believed that collecting originates in an infant’s
trauma associated with bowel control, holding onto one’s poop then becomes holding onto
one’s objects.
Werner Muensterberger, the author of “Collecting, an Unruly Passion,” believed collecting
to be a relief from the shock and uncertainty felt when an infant realizes they’re a separate
entity from their mother.
They're alone, and an object helps fill that void.
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott describes a comfort object as something that substitutes
the mother-child bond.
Often a physical object like a teddy bear or security blanket, it’s the first possession
of the child that’s understood to be not the mother and not me.
Like thumb sucking replacing the comfort of breast-feeding, the teddy bear becomes a source
of emotional security.
Collecting is when this protection becomes a passion.
But being a collector requires access to and the availability of objects.
Historically, only the elite had access - Bishops like Abbot Suger collected religious relics
such as splinters allegedly taken from the Holy Cross; alchemists during the reign of
Rudolf II gathered artifacts from around the world, with the hopes that somewhere within
the collection lie the Philosopher's Stone, believed to be capable of teaching humanity
the alphabet of creation; and Tsar Peter the Great turned an inherited cabinet of curiosities,
furniture designed to store magical objects like bezoars and unicorn horns, which were
actually narwhal tusks, into a collection spanning thirty rooms that was eventually
opened to the public in 1714.
The availability of items to collect blossomed during colonization and the expansion of trade.
A generation before Burdick, Sir Thomas Phillipps set out to collect one copy of every book
in the world, but it wasn’t until mass production that a set could reasonably be completed.
You couldn’t exactly collect a complete set of Greek sculptures.
Burdick lived in the first era in which an average person could build an extensive collection
of goods -- and then he lost control of his hands.
By age 33, chronic arthritis -- likely exacerbated from his job assembling electrical parts -- reduced
Burdick's mobility.
Living alone in Syracuse, New York, he renewed his childhood interest in cards and made it
his mission to collect every single one before he died.
And he did it the hard way.
Burdick's collection was built by trading with collectors he met through magazines and
by going to libraries, small store exhibits and auction sales.
Unfortunately for him, eBay, which today has over 800 million items listed and boasts $82
billion dollars worth of items sold in 2015, was sixty years away.
With Burdick, as with any true collector, there was no saturation point.
Just as eating food provides temporary hunger fulfillment, so does obtaining a new object.
Collector Paul Wallraf said he would “manger avec ses yeux” - “eat with his eyes”
-- A sentiment Burdick shared when he said, “Card collecting is primarily an inherited
love of pictures.”
The hunt to obtain a new object sparks a collector’s seeking system, defined by neuroscientist
Dr. Jaak Panksepp as a basic impulse in animals, including humans, “to search, investigate,
and make sense of the environment.”
It’s the same biological need that drives a dog to investigate a noise, or the curiosity
that influenced you to watch this video.
For a collector, the satisfaction from attaining a new piece quickly subsides... and the hunt
resumes.
Collecting as a form of preserving the past confirms our belief that there must be an
infinite truth.
Life existed before me and it will exist after me, and “Here’s the proof.”
Collecting as a form of inspiration influenced artists like Rembrandt, who made paintings
of his antique sculptures of Homer, Aristotle and Socrates.
Or writer Umberto Eco, who when asked if he had time to read his huge collection of literature
and poetry said, “It is not indispensable to read a book - it’s enough to touch it
and by a mysterious fluid, you absorb it.”
Whether it’s Eco’s mysterious fluid or a tribal belief that objects carry mana, it’s
the reason an X-ray of Elvis Presley can sell for $3,500 and an X-ray of your cousin Larry
was probably thrown away.
And collecting as a form of establishing one’s identity is a celebration of individuality
because no two collections are the same.
Your button, coin or card collection creates a conceptual circle of magic that wards off
uncertainty and chaos, helps define you, and proves not only that you exist, but that you
are unique.
A collection is a secure micro world of order entirely controlled by you in a macro world
of chaos… but that becomes a problem when the toy trains control the conductor.
In 2013, Hoarding Disorder was split off into its own entry under Obsessive-Compulsive and
Related Disorders in the DSM-V. It’s defined as persistent difficulty discarding or parting
with possessions regardless of the value others may attribute to them.
The American Psychiatric Association estimates that two to five percent of the population
suffer from Hoarding Disorder, which creates fire hazards and health hazards for themselves
and family members.
Some people are incapable of letting their objects go.
But as Burdick’s health deteriorated, letting go of his collection became a personal crusade.
When Sir Hans Sloane donated his massive collection of coins, books and dried plants to The Royalty
Society in 1759, The British Museum was born.
Jefferson Burdick was determined to leave his legacy here at The Met - and curator A.
Hyatt Mayor accepted the offer under the condition that Burdick organize it all.
He spent the next 16 years cataloguing all 300,000 cards, and eventually moved to New
York City to work on the project full-time at a small oak desk here in the Print Department
of The Met.
Along the way, he developed The American Card Catalog, a classification system for organizing
old cards that’s still used today.
Burdick was determined to immortalize his collection in the face of his progressing
illness.
It became a race against time; he took cortisone shots that made him sick just to briefly dull
pain so bad that it took a full minute of agony just to put on his hat.
He’d often tell Mayor, “I might not make it.”
But he did.
When the final card was glued down into history, he stood up, painfully twisted into his coat,
and said, “I shan’t be back.”
The very next day, Jefferson Burdick checked into University Hospital and never checked
out.
He died two months later.
According to Mayor, the cause of his death was an exhausted heart.
But he didn't die from collecting.
He lived from it.
And in his collection lived the dream that a nobody like Jefferson Burdick, a nobody
like me, a nobody like you, each in our own unique way has a chance to leave a lasting,
positive mark on this world.
And as always - thanks
for watching.