Like most people, I don’t use cash as much as I used to. But when I do use it, I’m sometimes reminded of the pleasures that only a cash transaction can provide.

The most recent instance of this happened the other day when I bought a few items at my local bodega. The total came to $14.90, so I paid with a $20 bill and received a fiver and two nickels as change. I don’t know why the shopkeeper gave me two nickels instead of a dime, but I’m glad he did, because one of them, as you can see above, was a 1928 buffalo nickel! I’ve seen them before, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve received one as change. This one is nearly 100 years old, so it’s fun to think of all the pockets it’s been in, the places it’s gone, the commerce it’s been part of, the stories it could tell.

Despite its age, this nickel not particularly valuable. My amateur assessment is that it’s in “VG” condition, which according to various online price guides means it’s worth somewhere between $1.75 and $3.50. This isn’t surprising when you consider that 1928 nickels aren’t exactly scarce (the Philadelphia mint made over 23.4 million of them), plus nickel isn’t a precious metal (a 1928 quarter in comparable condition is worth $12 to $15, mainly because it’s made of silver).

But while this buffalo nickel may not have much monetary value, it nonetheless ended up sending me down a fun rabbit hole. For starters, some of you may be thinking, “Wait a minute, where’s the buffalo?” That’s because the titular animal (which is actually a bison, not a buffalo) appears on the back of the coin. The front, or obverse, shows a profile view of a Native American — a composite of several men, according to the coin’s designer, James Earle Fraser — so I’ve never understood why these are typically called “buffalo nickels” instead of “Indian head nickels.” I mean, we don’t call the current five-cent coin a “Monticello nickel,” right? Are any other American coins commonly referred to by what’s on the back?

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Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about Inconspicuous Consumption’s shorthand abbreviation — IC. If you say it out loud, it sounds like “I see.” That feels right, because Inconspicuous Consumption is often about seeing small details, seeing things that other people miss, the surprise of discovery, and so on. You see? IC!

I’ve been thinking that the resonance between “IC” and “I see” might make the basis for a good logo or T-shirt. For a while I tinkered with a lowercase “i” dotted with an eyeball, like this:

But I couldn’t find a way to integrate that into a larger concept that really communicated the “IC”/“I see” connection. The truth is, I’m not a very good designer.

But maybe some of you folks are. So today I’m issuing a call for entries: Let’s come up with an Inconspicuous Consumption graphic that riffs on the connection between “IC” and “I see.”

A few notes for those who want to take on this challenge:

• You’re welcome to run with my eye-dotted “i” idea if you like, but that’s absolutely not required.

• Your design can include the words “Inconspicuous Consumption” or not. Up to you.

• Similarly, your design can include images of things we’ve talked about here (Brannock Devices, manicules, zebra boards, etc.), or not. Again, up to you.

• If you can find a way to use the phrase “I see,” said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw, I’ll be very impressed.

• If I particularly like your design, I will put it on a T-shirt that I’ll make available in the IC shop. I’ll split the sales profits with you 50/50, plus you’ll get a free T-shirt with your design.

• This is a design challenge, not a contest. I may end choosing multiple designs for the T-shirt treatment, or just one, or none. Depends on how I like the designs.

• Please: No AI or AI-assisted designs.

• Email your design to me by June 25th (that’s three weeks from today). You can submit as many designs as you like.

I think that covers it, but let me know if you have any additional questions. Thanks, and have fun with your designs!

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• You know how the USPS logo shows a stylized eagle? A bird-centric artist named Alex Tominson has reimagined the logo for all of the country’s official state birds (see above).

• Did you know that Nepal has its own time zone, which is 15 minutes off from all the others? It’s true!

• Oh man, check out this absolutely sensational pop-up book — so good (from Trish Clark):

• Miriam Sicherman spotted this car with a 1976 Carter/Mondale bumper sticker (see below). Not sure if that’s just an isolated instance or if retro political bumper stickers are a trend. Anyone know more?

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

My friend Janet recently attended an event at Green-Wood Cemetery, the celebrated Brooklyn oasis that opened in 1838 and is now the final resting place for about 600,000 souls.

Fifty-eight of those souls are listed on the two-page spread shown above, which Janet photographed during the event. Those pages are part of a ledger listing people who were interred at Green-Wood in 1884. Let’s zoom in a bit to get a better view of the spectacular penmanship:

The registry has all the column headings you’d expect to see: “Name,” “Place of Birth,” “Age,” etc. But what really gets me is the column on the right-hand page labeled “Cause of Death,” which earns extra pathos points for having the various maladies rendered in that same magnificent calligraphy:

I have so many questions. For starters, note that the very first cause of death listed at the top of the column is “Paralysis,” which is not something I’d normally think of as a fatal condition. Like, can you really die of paralysis? Wouldn’t it be more likely that you died of something else that caused the paralysis? (By odd coincidence, paralysis also appears as the final entry at the bottom of the column, so the list is essentially bookended by immobility.)

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Yesterday I wrote about how I recently rediscovered an old Juicy Fruit gum wrapper that I thought I’d lost about 20 years ago. The wrapper was originally sent to me back in 1996 by friends who thought I’d be interested in the odd slogan printed on the packaging: “The Gum With the Fascinating Artificial Flavor.”

As it turns out, that slogan is just one small part of a brand history that’s loaded with surprising details. For example:

1. Juicy Fruit was Wrigley’s first commercial gum.

When William Wrigley Jr. went into the gum biz (he had previously sold soap and baking soda), Juicy Fruit was his first commercial product, launching in 1893. Wrigley’s Spearmint, which has become much more iconic in the marketplace, debuted later that same year. Doublemint followed more than two decades later, in 1914.

2. Juicy Fruit’s key marketing term is “fascinating.”

As near as I can figure, the earliest use of “fascinating” in Juicy Fruit marketing came around 1930, when the phrase “Fascinating Flavor” began appearing on the gum’s packaging. You can see it on the underside of the Juicy Fruit pack shown in this ad:

The “Fascinating Flavor” phrase was soon amended to become “Has a Fascinating Flavor” (emphasis mine), as seen in this 1931 ad:

By the 1940s, this slogan had morphed into “A Fascinating Artificial Flavor” (emphasis mine). This seems bizarre by contemporary standards, but the advent of synthetic flavorings probably seemed modern and science-y at the time. Here’s how it looked on an individually wrapped stick of Juicy Fruit:

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In 1996 — that’s 30 years ago — my friends Eve and David were doing some renovations on their home in Portland, Oregon. At one point they pulled up a floorboard and saw an old Juicy Fruit gum wrapper that had somehow ended up there, probably after being discarded by a worker. It looked very much like the brand’s then-current wrapper design, except for the slogan printed beneath the Juicy Fruit logo: “The Gum With the Fascinating Artificial Flavor.”

They don’t write marketing pitches like that anymore! Eve and David knew this was precisely the type of thing I tend to be intrigued by, so they mailed the wrapper to me. I ended up writing about it in 1997, as part of a magazine article about products with unusual flavors, and then the following year I reprinted that article in issue No. 8 of my zine, Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption.

After I wrote about the wrapper, I put it in a drawer where I typically save little oddball treasures. And then … honestly, I’m not sure what happened after that. Although I don’t recall the exact timeline, I know at some point I realized that the Juicy Fruit wrapper had disappeared. Had I carelessly discarded it? Was it hidden away in a spot where I hadn’t thought to look for it? Did it somehow get separated from the rest of my possessions during a move? All I knew for sure was that I felt shitty about losing this special gift that two friends had sent to me.

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As most of you know by now, I love mail, especially if it comes in a hand-addressed envelope. But while all handwritten mail is good, some dispatches are particularly exceptional. The letter shown above, which I was recently lucky enough to receive, is one such specimen.

There’s so much to love here, beginning with the loooong manicule (i.e., a pointing hand), which is a topic we’ve previously explored here on IC. Even better, this manicule is left-handed! And of course I love the striped sleeve, complete with ribbed trim on the cuff.

If we zoom in, you can see that the sender used stamps that are actually celebrating the U.S. Postal Service! In other words, this is mail that’s about mail — perfect for a postal enthusiast like me.

If we shift our focus from the upper-right corner to the upper-left, something remarkable becomes apparent: The return address, which appears to be a rubber stamp based on handwritten lettering, includes an upside-down “N,” which is another topic that’s been covered here on IC!

Now let’s turn the envelope over. The back flap has an appealing illustration of a safety pin, making it look like the envelope had been pinned shut.

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Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

On Sunday evening I went to the Manhattan cocktail bar Pearl Box, where the matchbook-centric website Oh, What a Match! was hosting a meet-and-swap gathering of phillumenists (read: matchbook collectors). Although I’m not a phillumenist myself, I’m always interested in collections and the collectors who collect them, so I was curious to see what this scene was all about. I brought along the 1956 matchbook catalog that I recently wrote about, which I figured would make for some good show-and-tell.

Most of the other attendees had matchbooks and matchboxes spread out and available for swapping on the tables in front of them, as shown in the photo above. Here are some additional pics, just to give you a sense of the proceedings (click on the thumbnails to see larger versions):

A few notes:

• I was surprised to see that nobody was collecting or swapping vintage matchbooks — just current or contemporary stuff. In that regard, this collecting culture was very alien to me, because I’m all about vintage items. But that’s just me. There’s nothing wrong with collecting current stuff!

• I talked to several of the phillumenists. Some said they adhered to certain protocols, like collecting matchbooks only from places they’d actually visited in person (which is one fun aspect of collecting current items instead of vintage). Others were more interested in the matchbooks’ aesthetics, regardless of any personal connection to the establishment. All were very enthusiastic.

• It was a young crowd, with most of the attendees in their 20s or early 30s. My friend Adriene and I, both in our early 60s, were easily the oldest people there (including the staff).

• The most intriguing thing, at least to me, was that the crowd also skewed female — about 70-30, I’d say, maybe even 80-20. Collector-geek scenes are usually very male-oriented, so it was kind of refreshing to encounter a collecting community that doesn’t fit that mold.

All the tables were taken by the time Adriene and I arrived, so I sat in between two tables and opened up the 1956 catalog, which I hoped would be a good conversation starter.

So how did that go? Honestly, not so well. There were two people who were very interested in the catalog right when I sat down, but I appeared to be invisible to nearly everyone else. A few people made brief eye contact with me as they walked by, so I said, “This is a 1950s matchbook catalog…” and then I could see their eyes glazing over and they moved on. They just didn’t care.

And that’s fine. Like I said, these people weren’t into vintage stuff, so I can understand why a 1950s catalog didn’t interest them. Moreover, I’m not a real phillumenist and I didn’t have anything to swap, so I was kinda crashing their party. It was mostly an interesting fly-on-the-wall social experiment.

Since I didn’t have anything to trade, I didn’t get anything from the other attendees, but I nonetheless left with some matches. First, the bar had a really interesting giveaway matchbox designed like a pack of cigarettes:

That’s pretty cool! Maybe the cigarette-esque box is a common design format these days (can anyone confirm?), but I’d never seen it before.

In addition, the website that organized the event was giving away noir-ish feature matchbooks (as you may recall from this recent post, “feature” refers to a design being printed on the actual matchsticks, not just on the cover):

Incidentally, one of the few men on hand was a reporter from Bloomberg Businessweek, who told me he was there because he’s working on an article about the renewed enthusiasm for freebie matchbooks at restaurants and bars. It’s not every day that Businessweek and Inconspicuous Consumption both have a reporter covering the same event, but that just goes to show how phillumeny is enjoying a cultural moment these days.

Apostrophes, Continued

Shortly after I published Tuesday’s deep dive about apostrophe positioning on vertically lettered signs, I became aware of a particularly interesting example: Ralph’s Club, located in Tracy, California. As you can see in the photos above, the sign includes a centered apostrophe, but it’s turned sideways, so it looks more like a hyphen! I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.

Those photos are are both from the early 2010s. The sign was refurbished in 2023. The bad news is that they used LEDs instead of true neon (grrrr), plus they monkeyed with some of the letterforms (the new “A” is particularly awful). But the good news is that they retained the odd apostrophe:

I’ll tell you what: If you wanted to come up with a good organizing theme for a cross-country road trip, you could do a lot worse than planning your route around vertical, apostrophe-inclusive signs. Hmmmm.

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Inconspicuous News Roundup

• Reader Llarry Amrose recently visited Egeskov Castle in Denmark, which has an cool exhibit of vintage bicycle bells (shown above).

• Whoa, check out these magnification pics of sand from various locations around the world. So many variations! (From Jason Hillyer)

• Here’s a faaaascinating article on a really interesting topic: Back in the pre-Linotype days, when compositors set metal type by hand, there were typesetting races, with the fastest, most dextrous compositors competing against each other. Who knew?

• These animated letters are amazing.

• On the topic of obsessive recordkeeping: There’s a fan of the Polish soccer club Raków Częstochowa who for the past several decades has kept notebooks in which he meticulously documents the game-by-game starting lineup and kits for Raków and their opponents. You can see a typical notebook page below; additional pics and info here (from Ed Zelaski).

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

I was walking down Canal Street in Manhattan the other day with my friend (and IC reader!) Adriene Zepka when I noticed the Drake’s sign shown above and stopped to take a photo of it. “Wait, you’re photographing that?” she said. “What’s so special about it?”

The answer, of course, is that the Drake’s sign presents one possible answer to an eternal typographic question: Where should the apostrophe be positioned on a vertically lettered sign for a business with a possessive name?

There’s no straightforward solution to this conundrum, but there are four primary approaches that signmakers have taken over the years, plus a workaround option, each of which feels at least somewhat imperfect. Let’s take a look at each one, beginning with…

1. Put the Apostrophe in Front of the “S”

The Drake’s sign on falls into this category. Based on my photo research, however, this is a relatively uncommon option, with only a few other examples that I could find:

2. Put It After the Penultimate Letter

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Fed up with his inability to quell the constant flow of objects into his apartment, and determined to be able to fit his life into the trunk of his car, one day John Freyer decided to sell everything he owned on the internet. He invited his friends over to tag his possessions and systematically put them up for sale on eBay. An opened box of taco shells, half a bottle of mouthwash, almost all of his clothes, his favorite records, his sideburns (in a plastic bag), his family’s Christmas presents (not yet given), furniture — John didn’t let sentiment or utility stand in his way. Soon his belongings were sold all over the world, with a bag of Porky’s BBQ Pork Skins making its way to Japan, and a chair ending up in the Museum of Modern Art.

This project (which also inspired a book) is so completely in my wheelhouse, I’m not sure how I’d never heard of it before. Big thanks to reader Clint Wrede for bringing it to my attention.

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Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

Remember “Lexi,” the Ohio woman who meticulously logged all the mail she sent and received over a 10-year period? One thing I loved about that project, aside from its niche-specificity, was its obsessive sense of completism. Lexi had an inner drive to document every single mailpiece in her life. Similarly, we recently learned that IC reader Bob Andrews is driven to record every single gas fill-up for his car. For people like Lexi and Bob, “almost” isn’t enough: They are completists.

Still, as completism goes, car refueling and postal activity are relatively small-scale pursuits. What if you wanted a more ambitious completist project? Something like, for example, documenting every single thing you own?

I recently learned about several people who have tried to do just that. One of them is the Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins, who in 2015 decided to photograph every object she owned, creating a sort of catalog of her material possessions (you can see a small sampling above). On her website, she describes the project like so:

As a neurotic collector, collecting, ordering, categorizing, and exhibiting things have always given me immense pleasure. I think that I am mainly looking for an aesthetic emotion in the assemblage of things (or ideas) that at first glance might seem incongruous or even tasteless.

I'd like to keep things as they are, but my adult life decided otherwise. After many moves and a sudden divorce in 2015, I left Amsterdam and came back to live in Brussels with my three children under my arm.

Longing for more stability in my life, I felt the urge to really lock myself into my new place. I decided then and there to push the limits of my inertia and neuroticism by getting up close and personal with my belongings and analyzing all of them in detail.

From then on, for four years, room by room, drawer by drawer, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house. Absolutely everything: from my daughter’s torn sock to my son’s Lego, but also my vibrator, my anxiolytics... absolutely everything.

Iweins photographed 12,795 objects during her four-year project. You can see all of them on her website (it takes a little while for the full set of pics to load), where you can also sort them by color, by material, by room, and so on. It’s an impressive project, and a fun interface.

Iweins’s completist approach to documenting her material possessions may have been influenced by the British artist Simon Evans, who in 2009 created a piece called Everything I Have, which documented, well, everything he had:

At first glance, Everything I Have looks like a bunch of tiny illustrations. But if we zoom in, you can see that it’s actually a cut-and-paste assemblage of photos and captions. Here’s a closer look:

Evans’s completist compendium covers 1,112 items — a mere drop in the materialist bucket compared to Iweins’s 12,795. It’s not clear if Evans had fewer possessions than Iweins and/or if he applied a less rigorous recordkeeping protocol. Perhaps, unlike Iweins, he didn’t feel the need to include his sex toys or his children’s torn hosiery. Either way, it’s satisfying to see all of his items (or at least what he claims to be all of them) compiled into one artwork.

Cataloging one’s worldly possessions raises a lot of questions. For starters, your personal inventory is constantly in flux. Every time you go to the supermarket, pick up a new ChapStick at the corner store, or get your daily mail delivery, you suddenly have more objects; every time you take out the trash, sell something on eBay, or eat an apple out of the fridge, you have fewer. So even when you “finish” the project of documenting “everything,” you’re never really done.

Then there’s the question of quantitative enumeration. Is a six-pack of beer one item or six? If you have a three-pack of paper towel rolls but three loose rolls of toilet paper, should they be counted the same or differently, and why?

I was thinking of exploring these issues with Evans and Iweins. But then, in a bizarre coincidence, I learned that someone in my own Brooklyn neighborhood was in the process of — wait for it — documenting all of her possessions! This incredible happenstance presented itself to me about a month ago, when a woman named Bayyina Black posted the following message to my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook:

Hey neighbors!

I’m leaving New York at the end of April/top of May. Which means I have A LOT to give away.

I’m doing a project called The Story of My Stuff, where I’m documenting and archiving everything I own before I go. Think: home décor, books, craft supplies, clothes, bags, plants, kitchen items, toys, art supplies, and so much more.

She was beginning by getting rid of some books, which she had documented with identical camera perspectives:

I wanted to know more about Bayyina’s project, so I messaged her and asked if we could meet. She said sure, so a few days later — April 14th — I visited her apartment (about a 10-minute walk from mine) and talked with her for about an hour.

“I’m a maximalist,” she explained. “That means I have a lot of things — I like stuff, and I can get a bit obsessive about collecting things. It also means I dream really, really big.”

Like, say, dreaming about documenting an estimated 10,000 personal possessions — some in her home and some in a nearby storage unit — in less than a month. “It’s probably unrealistic, given the time frame,” she admitted. “It started because I have way too much stuff and I needed a dopamine-hit, instant-gratification way to figure out how to get rid of my things in a fun and engaging way. I also wanted to commemorate this season in my life and know what I had up to this point.” She said she’d been influenced by Marie Kondo’s decluttering manifesto, Spark Joy, and also by Christine Platt’s book The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less, which explores Black Americans’ complex historical relationships with material culture, class, and related issues.

I checked back with Bayyina toward the end of April. She said time constraints had forced her to abandon the photo-documentation process soon after we met (not surprising) but that the abbreviated project had still been worthwhile, in large part because she was now more aware of her purchases. “I am a lot more mindful, and it has made me not buy something unless I absolutely need it.” That seems to be an implicit point behind all of these object-recording projects — to have a more thoughtful approach toward our consumption-based culture.

But it’s worth noting that not all cultures are as conspicuously consumptive as ours. As I worked on this article, I learned about a 1995 book by the photographer Peter Menzel, called Material World. It features portraits of statistically “average” families from 30 different countries, with each family accompanied by all their possessions. The range of material accumulation from one family to the next, based on cultural and economic norms, is fascinating. (You can see 18 of portraits from the book on Menzel’s website.)

The book raises an intriguing question: How would you feel about being photographed with all of your possessions? Would you be proud? Ashamed? I’m guessing that for most of us — myself definitely included — it would be a mix of both. (The one thing I’m sure of, though, is that I’d rather be photographed with all my stuff than have to catalog all of it myself.)

If anyone out there has ever been moved to document all of their belongings, or to pursue any other sort of completist project, you know what to do. Thanks.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• The vintage dress shown above has lots of recipes printed on it. Here’s a great article by a woman who bought the dress and then tried a bunch of those recipes. If I were the kind of person who bought vintage dresses, this is exactly the article I would have written! (From Trish Clark)

• Also wish I’d thought of doing a story on the old analog buzzer/intercom systems found in so many NYC buildings.

• New York commuters in the 1940s left some pretty odd things on the subway, including lots of dentures. (From Brian Helfrich)

• With America’s 250th birthday fast approaching, here’s a look back at all sorts of bicentennial kitsch that flooded the market in 1976.

• In a related item, here’s the backstory on the bicentennial logo (from reader Salvador):

• If you enjoyed our recent discussions of phillumeny, you’ll probably like this archive of matchbox label designs. (From Mark Hurst)

• Here’s a brilliantly niche-specific assessment of Penguin Books’ green-themed crime paperback cover designs from the 1960s. (From John Darnielle)

• A Philadelphia artist is making a replica of the World Cup championship trophy out of fingernail and toenail clippings (and needs you to donate yours or he won’t have enough!).

• This is pretty awesome: NASA has a web page that lets you spell out your name (or I guess anything else) in satellite imagery. (From Rob Walker)

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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Yesterday I wrote about a spectacular 1956 Monarch Match Company sample catalog that was recently given to me. At the end of that piece, I mentioned the term phillumeny (fih-LOO-muh-nee), which is the hobby of collecting match-related items. I want to talk a little bit about that today, because phillumeny — derived from the Greek phil (loving) and the Latin lumen (light) — is currently having a bit of a moment.

You might find that surprising. I certainly did, given the steep decline of smoking in our culture and the availability of disposable lighters. Who needs matches anymore? But it turns out that there’s a new generation of phillumenists out there, and they don’t necessarily smoke. They just like collecting matches as fun souvenirs.

They like them so much, in fact, that an increasing number of restaurants, bars, and hotels, most of which long ago stopped providing complimentary matchbooks emblazoned with their names and logos, have begun offering them again. That in turn has led to the rise of websites like Matchbooktraveler, which features lists of business all over the country that offer free matchbooks. Here, for example, is their list of such establishments in Los Angeles. (Matchbooktraveler also has an active Facebook page.)

In addition, there’s a phillumeny-centric Substack called Oh, What a Match!, along with tons of match-related content on TikTok, Lemon8, YouTube, and other social media platforms.

It’s easy enough to see the appeal. A well-designed matchbook cover is like a miniature poster, plus there’s the nostalgic charm and the pyro factor. In addition, some matchbooks, called feature books, offer the bonus fun of having designs printed on the matchsticks (click thumbnails for larger versions):

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As most of you are probably aware by now, I’m very fond of midcentury salesman sample catalogs. In addition to enjoying the catalogs themselves, I also like thinking about how they were used. I usually picture a suit-clad salesman marching into a retail shop, briefcase in hand, and then pulling his company’s latest catalog out of the briefcase and going over the new product line with the shop owner.

Ah, but what if the briefcase is the catalog?

That’s the situation with a remarkable artifact that was recently given to me by a longtime reader. It’s a salesman sample catalog for the Monarch Match Company, which made matchbooks (or, as they say in the industry, “book matches”). But instead of being housed in a conventional loose-leaf binder, the catalog pages are in a briefcase with a seven-ring binder mechanism built into the interior of the case itself!

As you can see on that first page, the Monarch Match Company was headquartered in San Jose. The company operated for a relatively short period, from 1946 through 1966. This catalog appears to be from 1956, with a few updates from 1957 through the early 1960s.

That was a peak time for matches in America — pre-Surgeon General’s Report, pre-disposable lighters (those would come in 1964 and 1973, respectively). The matchbook, which had been patented in 1892, had emerged in the 20th century as an inexpensive vehicle for advertising, with all sorts of businesses giving away freebie matchbooks emblazoned with their name, logo, phone number, and so on. So match manufacturers like Monarch weren’t really in the match biz; they were in the advertising biz. As a result, the Monarch catalog has almost nothing to say about the quality of the company’s matches and instead has lots of chatter about how a well-designed matchbook can be “your silent salesman” and serve as “your own ad right in the customer’s pocket.” The catalog’s introductory text actually goes so far as to say, “The matches themselves are incidental, being merely the MEDIUM whereby you make certain the message you wish to convey is read by the folks you want to reach.”

So let’s imagine a Monarch salesman striding into a store in his sales territory while carrying this briefcase. The case is truly brief, measuring 10½ inches high by 12 inches wide — smaller than the standard 12-by-18-inch attaché size — and has the company name and location printed on the cover in gold lettering. It appears that the salesman’s name was also printed, but that line of type, sadly, has been removed.

Also of note: The briefcase’s plastic handle is imprinted with faux stitching, to simulate the look of a leather handle — a design trend I wrote about last year. Interesting to see that this phenomenon dates back at least to the mid-1950s.

But enough about the case — let’s talk about the catalog, which is spectacular. It features dozens of real matchbook covers, complete with striking surfaces, glued onto the catalog pages. Here are some typical two-page spreads, showing various designs on white, yellow, and “Colorama” backgrounds (note also that the catalog page numbers are shown in little matchbook icons at the lower-outside corner of each page):

These are the most basic options offered in the catalog. Here are some other specialty design elements that Monarch’s customers could choose from:

Metallic Colors

You say you want something flashier than the standard colors? Try putting your ad on a metallic background, or have it printed in metallic ink:

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Earlier this week I wrote about “Lexi,” the woman who lived in New Lexington, Ohio, about 100 years ago and kept a journal in which she obsessively logged every piece of mail she sent or received over a 10-year period.

It’s not clear why Lexi felt the need to maintain a record of her postal activities, but her story struck a chord with Inconspicuous Consumption reader Bob Andrews, who posted the following comment on that article:

[T]hanks to Lexi, I don’t feel so bad about keeping car gas fill-up journals for the last 40+ years — journals that I’ve never once had the need to refer to but have kept anyway.

I was intrigued, so I emailed Bob and asked if he could send a few photos. That’s him in the photo shown above, holding his current gas journal. Here are some representative pages:

As you can see, each entry consists of four data points: the date, the odometer reading at the time of the fill-up, the total price, and the number of gallons purchased. It’s a collection of sorts!

I had questions, so I asked Bob for an interview. Here’s a transcript of our discussion, edited for length and clarity:

Inconspicuous Consumption: Do you recall when you started doing this?

Bob Andrews: I do. The first vehicle I bought that was mine — not something handed down from my dad or something like that — was an ’81 Corolla in ’81. So I started then.

IC: Whoa — that’s 45 years ago!

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Exactly 101 years ago today — April 21st, 1925 — a woman who lived in or around the town of New Lexington, Ohio, received three pieces of mail. One was a card from a woman named Merle; she also received a letter from Mary W. and another letter from Marjorie W.

That same day, the New Lexington woman — let’s call her Lexi — mailed a letter to Clare McD. The following day, April 22nd, she sent a letter to Kim. The day after that, April 23rd, she sent a letter to Mary Wilson and also sent a letter and some flower seeds to Marjorie (presumably the same “Mary W.” and “Marjorie W.” from whom she’d received letters two days earlier) .

We know all this because Lexi kept a logbook, running almost 200 pages long, in which she meticulously recorded every piece of mail she received and sent from the start of 1917 through August of 1926, creating a nearly decade-long archival record of her postal activity. A quick flip-through video of the book is shown above, and here’s the two-page spread that shows the letters I just mentioned:

As you can see, the pages are headed “Received” on the left and “I sent” on the right. The numbered arrows correspond to the following entries:

1. “A card from Merle Apr. 21”

2. “A letter from Mary W. Apr. 21”

3. “A letter from Marjorie W. Apr. 21”

4. “A letter to Clare McD Apr 21”

5. “A letter to Kim Apr. 22”

6. “A letter to Mary Wilson Apr. 23”

7. “A letter and flower seeds to Marjorie Apr 23”

It’s one of the most brilliantly obsessive artifacts I’ve ever encountered. Lots of people save letters, but maintaining a record of your letters really takes things to the next level. I mean, I’ve written before about how I love mail, but Lexi must have really loved mail.

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When I was growing up in a small town on Long Island, I would wait for the school bus each morning at a street corner near my family’s house. There was a telephone pole installed at that corner, and the pole was a popular spot for people to post signs about upcoming yard sales, “Lost Dog” flyers, “Handyman Available” notices, and the like. As a result, a portion of the pole’s surface was completely encrusted with nails, tacks, and heavy-duty staples, sort of like the industrial version of an everything bagel.

Once I noticed this phenomenon, I became fascinated by it. I didn’t really have the language for this as a child, but I think I saw the array of hardware on the pole as a form of accidental abstract art. I also thought about how each nail or staple represented a sign that had been affixed to the pole, and how each one had been affixed by someone who was probably one of my neighbors. In short, each metal fastener represented a potential story.

That street corner is shown above. There’s still a pole there (it might even be the same one I grew up with1), and if you zoom in on the photo you’ll see that it’s still covered in nails and staples.

I hadn’t thought about any of that that in many years, probably because I’ve lived my entire adult life in New York City, most of which doesn’t have utility poles because our phone lines, power lines, and so on are mostly buried underground (and even in the neighborhoods that do have old-fashioned utility poles, the poles tend to be positioned along property lines in people’s backyards, not on the street), so flyers tend to be taped to metal lampposts, not nailed or stapled to wooden poles.

But my interest in utility pole surfaces was recently rekindled by IC reader Kurt Rozek (who you may remember from his improvised fix of a street sign typo, which I wrote about a few months ago). He’s spent more than a decade documenting the nails and other hardware on a pole in Allouez, Wisconsin. Here’s the pole in its natural habitat, at the northeast corner of Webster Avenue and Hoffman Road:

Although you can’t see it in that long view, the pole’s surface is full of nails, screws, and staples, and Kurt’s reaction to it was similar to my childhood response. “I was intrigued by all of the different nails and screws, the different sizes, nail heads, textures, etc.,” he recently told me. “I thought it looked really neat, almost artsy as opposed to being an eyesore.”

That led Kurt to take his first photo of the pole, on January 10th, 2014:

“I then became curious to see if much changed over time,” says Kurt. So almost exactly four years later — on January 17th, 2018 — he returned to take another photo of the same spot on the pole:

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I really enjoy seeing how things are made, so it makes sense that I’ve always loved factory tours. Over the years, I’ve toured facilities that make candy bars, pretzels, potato chips, Tabasco sauce, ice cream cones, maple syrup, beer, whiskey, farm equipment, baseball bats, footballs, cigarettes, glass, musical instruments, Brannock Devices, Barbicide, New York City street signs, and probably a bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

Those are all fairly mainstream products. But I recently toured a factory that makes something a bit more specialized — something I’d never even thought about until a few months ago: fabric flowers.

Fabric flowers, which are most often made from silk (although sometimes from cotton, wool, or other textiles), are used by dressmakers, milliners, film and theater costume designers, wedding planners, event planers, visual merchandisers, and pretty much anyone else who needs durable, lifelike flowers that won’t wilt and die. Hundreds of American companies used to make them, primarily in New York City, but the industry is now based largely in Asia. One U.S. manufacturer remains, however: M&S Schmalberg, which has been operating in New York since 1916 and is still headquartered in what remains of Manhattan’s garment district.

I became aware of M&S Schmalberg (and of fabric flowers in general) last October, when I saw that they were offering a factory tour. I wasn’t able to attend that one, but I jumped at the chance when they offered another one last month. And in a lucky break, there was only one other person in my tour “group,” so the two of us had a very personal tour experience with company co-owner Adam Brand, whose great-great-uncle founded M&S over a century ago.

Brand spent a good 40 minutes or so just sitting down with us in the company’s reception area, giving us the M&S backstory, answering our many questions, and getting to know us a bit. Then he brought us into the inventory area, which was filled with stacks of boxes, each containing various flowers that had already been made.

Then it was time to visit the production area, where we saw shelf after shelf of flower-shaped metal tools. First there were stamping dies, which are used to make floral cutouts in the desired fabric, sort of like using cookie cutters on dough.

Back in the old days, Brand explained, a worker would have made the fabric cutouts by hitting the die with a large, primitive-looking hammer. The company still has several of these tools on hand, although they aren’t used much anymore.

Nowadays, the die is positioned over the fabric and a machine applies the pressure for a stack of neatly punched cutouts. Brand showed us the process with two different dies and a machine that he said was from the 1960s:

The flat cutouts are then pressed in heated metal molds, which provide curvature and depth to the fabric. Brand showed us how the same cutouts could result in very different floral shapes depending on which mold they were pressed into (this video is more than two minutes long, but it’s worth it — trust me):

In that video, Brand mentions that they use the hand-operated molds only for demonstrations and small orders. Larger orders are handled by machine-driven molds, as seen in this much shorter video:

Skilled artisans — some of whom have worked for M&S for decades — then use glue and wire to layer the molded fabric into finished artificial flowers, as seen here:

All of this takes place in a fairly humble-looking space on the seventh floor of a building on West 36th Street in Manhattan. It doesn’t have the feel of “big business,” but there are occasional reminders that M&S has some seriously big-name clients:

In the old days, M&S sold only to commercial clients. But they now do a brisk direct-to-consumer business on Etsy and Amazon. Brand said these sales now comprise 15% to 20% of the firm’s sales. (These orders are filled primarily with the premade flowers we saw in the inventory room, while commercial clients tend to have their flowers made to order.)

This was one of the best factory tours I’ve ever experienced. Scheduled for one hour, it ended up lasting twice that long (and I’m pretty sure Brand would have let us stay longer if we’d asked). If you want to take the tour yourself, there’s one being offered on April 16th, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Meanwhile, you can learn more about M&S Schmalberg on their website.

(Special thanks to fellow tour attendee Rebecca Fleming for letting me use one of her photos in this article, and to Adam Brand for being such a gracious host.)

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• Holy shmoly, look at that amazing collection of old Milwaukee transit passes! Additional info here. (From Beth Mathews)

• Our recent look at upside-down letters at Unity Temple and elsewhere prompted a note from IC reader Streeter Stuart, who teaches history at Penn Manor High School in Millersville, Pennsylvania. The school’s sports teams are called the Comets, so the gymnasium has “COMETS” spelled out on one of the exterior walls — including, unfortunately, an upside-down “E”:

• Nice article about an Indiana neon sign shop.

• Let’s say your job is to write definitions for a dictionary. How do you define orange, or green, or any other color? That question is at the heart of a new book that’s the subject of this very entertaining review.

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

The German movie director Werner Herzog is deservedly famous for his filmmaking prowess. But if you’ve ever heard him narrate one of his documentaries (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, many others), you know that he also has one of the world’s most compelling voices — a voice that’s at once otherworldly, theatrical, severe, and hypnotic.

I recently got to hear that voice in person, because Herzog was a speaker at the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Night in the Library,” an annual program of presentations based on a specific theme. This year’s theme was math (or, more specifically, “The Philosophy of Mathematics”). And via machinations that I can only imagine, they somehow managed to get Herzog to deliver the keynote address.

It’s a cliché to say that certain people have such amazing speaking voices that you’d gladly listen to them recite the multiplication tables. Herzog is definitely one of those people for me, and there he was, maybe 20 feet away from me, literally talking about multiplication tables:

I’ve mentioned before that I’m particularly fond of prime numbers, so it was fun to learn that Herzog feels similarly:

At one point Herzog addressed the quasi-mathematical topic of numerology (i.e., astrology, tarot, etc.), which was probably the funniest and most Herzogian part of the speech. I started filming just after he said, “Now we must talk about numerology”:

The official title of the speech was “Mathematics and the Sublime.” Here’s the part where he addressed that subject directly:

Herzog’s full speech lasted about 35 minutes. Here’s how he wrapped it up:

Okay, so he didn’t quite stick the landing with that “Dismissed!,” but it was still a really fun capper.

People, I have to tell you: Watching the one and only Werner freaking Herzog hold forth on the subject of mathematics — in the lobby of a library in Brooklyn! — was a positively surreal experience. It’s almost certainly going to rank as the best live performance of any kind that I’ll see this year. Hope you got as big a kick out of it as I did.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• A French architecture studio has installed four unconventional table tennis tables at a school as a way of encouraging children to come up with their own rules and strategies. Details here. (From Audrey Kalman)

• Here’s a good article by a British guy who collects mailboxes from around the world. (From Elizabeth Fox)

• Speaking of niche-specificity, there’s a blog devoted to sightings of barometers in movies and TV shows. (From The Art of Noticing’s Rob Walker)

• Did you know that some people in New Zealand live without their stomachs? It’s true!

• My friend Nina has been traveling in Taiwan, where she spotted these excellent stick figures in peril:

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This post includes a small grouping of photographs that are NSFW. — Paul

A little over a year ago, I drove up to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, for the Ephemera Society of America’s annual Ephemera Fair, where I saw loads of cool vintage stuff. I was looking forward to going back for this year’s edition of the Fair, especially once I learned that it would be taking place on March 21st, which happens to be my birthday. Perfect!

Just to clarify our terms here: In the collectibles world, ephemera usually refers to paper artifacts. That can mean postcards, print ads, books, magazines, catalogs, scrapbooks, diaries, brochures, ticket stubs, photographs, matchbook covers, stock certificates, report cards, menus, marriage licenses, business ledgers, passports, matchbook covers, receipts, wills, maps, and a lot more.

Just like last year, I saw loads of interesting items. Here are some of them:

Animal-Based Matchbox Label Collection

One of the first things that caught my eye was a scrapbook filled with vintage matchbox labels — with each page featuring a different animal! The photo above shows the “lion page,” and there were similar pages for elephants, reindeer, horses, and more (you can click on the thumbnails to see larger versions):

Horse Hair Scrapbook

Speaking of animals, I was blown away by this scrapbook featuring locks of hair from various horses — with beautifully handwritten notations to boot. What an interesting obsession to have! Here are some additional pics:

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Collection Agency, a series in which I interview unusual collectors, is an occasional feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see previous installments here.

This post is not paywalled. It includes lots of photos of relatively small items; if possible, try to read it on a computer instead of a phone. Enjoy! — Paul

I recently became aware of a guy named Michael Horvich. That’s him in the photo above, posing in the bedroom of his condo in Evanston, Illinois. As you can see, the bookshelves behind him hold a lot more than just books. Here’s a better view, so you can see everything Horvich has displayed on those shelves:

There are lots of collections there: hands, elephants, trolls, teddy bears, Jesuses, Buddhas, bead strings, and more. But that doesn’t tell the full story, because Horvich — a retired elementary school teacher who turns 81 today (happy birthday, Michael!) — is a serious collector, and no single image can capture the scope of his stuff. He refers to his home as Michael’s Museum, and every bit of it is filled with things he’s collected over the past half-century. I suspect you have to be there in person to get the full effect, but here are some additional photos that at least provide a sense of the layout (click on any thumbnail to see full-size versions):

And that’s just the home version of Michael’s Museum. Since 2011, the Chicago Children’s Museum has had a permanent exhibit called “Michael’s Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures,” which consists of 105 collections — totaling tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual objects — that Horvich donated.

In short, Horvich is no ordinary collector. Nor is he just a collector — he’s also a poet, a writer, a photographer, a bookbinder, and a lot more. His website announces itself as the home of “Michael A. Horvich Creativity Ltd.,” which sums up his approach to life. But collecting seems to be the cornerstone of his creative enterprise.

I like interviewing collectors, so of course I wanted to talk to Horvich. But instead of talking about his collections, which I figured he’d already done countless times, I thought he’d be the ideal person for a conversation about the larger phenomenon of collecting. Here’s the transcript of a video call we recently had, edited for length and clarity:

Inconspicuous Consumption: You are obviously a formidable collector. Do you consider yourself to be a professional collector?

Michael Horvich: No, it’s just what I do. It’s who I am and part of my life.

IC: What are some of the things you collect?

Horvich: Bakelite pieces, Indigenous people miniatures, bowling pin sets, books — distinguishing between teeny books, small books, and little books, all those distinctions. Hmmm, I’m thinking. I have an urban dollhouse. It’s like a high-rise presentation of the dollhouse. There’s game piece movers…

IC: Like the race car in Monopoly, or something like that?

Horvich: Right, right. But there’s like about 300 of them — different colors, shapes, textures, purpose.

IC: Your collections aren’t just about you — some of them also touch other people’s lives because they’re exhibited publicly, like at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Horvich: Yes. They get about a half a million visitors a year, and they tell me that Michael’s Museum is one of their most popular exhibits.

IC: Why do you think your collections are of interest to so many other people?

Horvich: I think part of it is because it’s a collection of collections, where any one object or even one collection doesn’t hold too much importance, so people can make of it what they want. It’s not like going in the water-play area and pretending that you’re in the water, or going in the store area and letting the kids pretend they’re running a grocery store. Michael’s Museum just is.

IC: What do you think is the value of children learning about collecting?

Horvich: I think everybody collects, including children. Even if you can imagine some of the poorest children with the most difficult life, you’ll find that they collect interesting rocks off the street, or things that are important to them.

IC: And do you think that’s some sort of pattern-recognition thing that we have as a species, or an instinct to impose order and systems onto the world around us?

Horvich: I think it’s intellectual, cognitive, emotional, and visceral. And so for kids, classifying, categorizing, labeling, sorting, those are all very important activities of learning.

And that never really stops. One morning when I was at the Children’s Museum, I saw an eight-month-old little girl, not even a year old. She was leaning against the glass of one of the display cabinets and pointing at each item in the display. There was something about them that intrigued her. Later that afternoon, I came back from lunch, same cabinet, and there was an 80-year-old woman doing the exact same thing.

IC: How many of something do you need to have for you to consider it a collection?

Horvich: Two. Around the museum, there are “Michael’s Quotes,” and one of those is that it takes two items to make a collection.

IC: In addition to being a collector, do you think of yourself as a curator? And if so, what’s the distinction?

Horvich: Definitely, definitely. My collections are not just helter-skelter — they’re all curated, their arrangement is carefully thought out, how they look when you first see them, how you can interact with them. People have said that it’s not just a collection of stuff, but it’s more like a small shrine that’s in honor of that stuff.

IC: What do you consider to be the difference between a collector and a hoarder?

Horvich: Oh, that’s easy, because I’ve written about that. In some ways, collecting and hoarding have nothing to do with each other, except maybe the volume of items. With a collector, the items are important. They have meaning, they have purpose. It’s not about being afraid of being hungry; it’s not because of being afraid of having less. It’s a healthy way of looking at things.

Whereas hoarding starts to border on unhealthy and in many cases can actually be dangerous, health-wise and physical-wise, to the person who’s hoarding. There is such an emotional attachment to things that, much like alcoholism, it starts to inhibit and slow down the person’s ability to exist in a healthy, normal fashion.

And again, it has to do with the respect and the reason for the items. I have a lot of stuff, but I don’t have 15, 20 toasters that I ordered from Amazon and haven’t opened yet. Almost every surface is in my condo is covered, but people tell me it’s calm, it’s tranquil, it’s peaceful, it’s meditative, even though there’s all this stuff around.

IC: When did you begin to have the urge to collect? Does it go back to your childhood, or was there a specific incident that triggered your collecting instinct?

Horvich: Ever since I was a little boy, I collected. My earliest memory is that a friend and I would sit on a stairway that led to his apartment and look through a cigar box filled with things that his mother helped him collect: sparkly things, broken jewelry, rhinestones, gems. Not worth anything, but I remember thinking how wonderful that collection was. I think that had a big influence on me.

At a certain point, maybe when I was 30, 35, I did a mental exercise and said, “Okay, what if there was a fire and I had to save just one thing?” So I put together a cigar box with my most important things in it. And again, that reminded me of that childhood experience. Today, what would happen if there was a fire? I would probably just grab the cat and leave, because in some ways it would be easier to lose everything than to try and choose.

IC: Why do you think some people are drawn to collecting, as you were from an early age, and others aren’t? Is it almost like a genetic thing? Why do you think some people sort of have that button waiting to be pushed and others don’t?

Horvich: That’s interesting — I don’t know. I mean, it might be fun to think about it being somewhat genetic. It might also be interesting to think about it being like nurture versus nature. Maybe your mom and dad helped keep you busy with all these things you could play with, so in adulthood maybe it’s a way of holding onto your youth. Or maybe it’s a fear of mortality — if I have a lot of things, then I can hold onto them as I’m being taken away by the angel of death. I don’t know.

But as I mentioned earlier, one thing I believe — and some people might argue with me about this — is that everyone collects, even if not everyone does it the same way. One time I was giving a talk to a group of about 25 people, and I asked, “How many of you collect?” Some people raised their hands and some didn’t. And I told them, “By the time we’re done here, when I ask that question again, I’m going to guess that everybody will raise their hand.” I said, “How many of you collect memories that you can tell stories about? How many of you collect photographs from vacations? If you you like to cook, do you collect recipes or cookbooks?” It doesn’t have to be a lot of little things, it doesn’t have to be things that you were given or that you purchased. You might say, “Oh no, I don’t collect anything,” and I’d look at your desk and say, “Well, what are all those pens?” “Oh, those are just different pens that I use — sometimes I like a thicker pen or a finer-line pen.” And I’d say, “Collection.”

IC: That’s interesting, because my next question was going to be “Do you get along with people who aren’t collectors?” But your answer to that is that everyone’s a collector.

Horvich: Yes.

IC: Can collecting be an art form, or at least be a form of creativity? And do you consider it that for yourself?

Horvich: Definitely. In many ways, my home is my studio. It’s my museum, but it’s also my studio. I consider it my art, the art of display, the art of collecting and curating.

Now, maybe you could go to school to become a curator, or take a course in display, design, and layout. I’ve never done any of that — it just comes to me kind of naturally. That’s more of a passion. Maybe it’s my way of still playing with things, like a child. I have a couple other friends who are avid collectors and we talk about playing with our things.

IC: That’s funny. Just last night I had drinks with a friend, and I brought along this little tin can I’d recently acquired, and I said, “I brought something for show and tell,” which of course is a children’s activity. Years ago I even hosted a monthly object-based live event called Show & Tell. So I definitely relate to that notion of childlike delight coming from our relationship with objects.

But here’s a question: Until about 30 years ago, the only way to really collect old things was to go to yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, antiques shops, and so on, and you’d piece together a collection one or two items at a time. Nowadays, you can go on eBay, search on “vintage beer tray” or whatever, and boom, you can have an instant collection. In your mind, does the ease of finding things in a digitally connected world devalue the resulting collection, or even devalue the very practice of collecting, or is it just another example of people adapting to changes in technology?

Horvich: Getting a full collection of something all at once is not something I’d do myself — I like the search, the excitement, the uniqueness, the scarcity — but that doesn’t make it less important. If that’s what someone wants to do, that’s fine.

But for me — well, I have several jars full of beach glass, and I found each piece of glass myself on the beach, one at a time. And there was this garage sale I went to where they had two or three jars full of beach glass. I was half-tempted, but then I thought, no, it’s not the same.

IC: We live in a very materialist culture — so much so that people sometimes refer to shopping as “retail therapy.” And that has led to the rise of certain anti-materialist counter-movements, like the decluttering movement or Marie Kondo-style minimalism — which is also sometimes described as therapy. I also keep hearing the phrase that people should seek experiences, not things. What is your response to all that?

Horvich: I think everything you said is true. I consider myself a Buddhist, and so I have given a lot of thought to the idea that you’re not supposed to become attached to things. Acquiring stuff, shopping just to shop, is not collecting. It’s not attributing or respecting or understanding or learning about the objects that you’re getting. That’s on the continuum towards not normal or healthy, like hoarding.

IC: Some people might say it’s very normal. I mean, it is literally the cultural norm in our society.

Horvich: Yeah. Maybe the definition should be argued over, but shopping just to cheer yourself up is on the continuum toward hoarding, whether the person wants to admit that or not.

IC: Do you ever get something new for one of your collections to cheer yourself up?

Horvich: Sure, but I also have a huge list of other things that cheer me up — I don’t need to shop. Sometimes I’ll go to an antiques shop and leave without anything. And there are other times where I’m thinking, “Well, I don’t want to go to the antiques shop today because I don’t really want or need anything.” So I’ll stay home and read a book or cook something or do something else to cheer myself up.

IC: When I mentioned that phrase about people embracing experiences, not things, you rolled your eyes. Why did you do that?

Horvich: I think people should experience everything. So to me, it’s not an “either or” situation. Collecting, curating, displaying — that’s an experience, too. So I reject “experiences vs. things” as a false choice.

IC: You’ve mentioned going to an antiques shop. Do you only look for collectibles at brick-and-mortar shops, or do you also poke around on websites like eBay and Etsy?

Horvich: I love to touch. I love to be at the shop. I love to discover. I don’t like as much to use eBay or the internet, but I’ll do it if there’s a particular item I’m seeking that I haven’t been able to find.

IC: I don’t mean to bring up an unpleasant topic, but as you get older, have you made plans or arrangements for what will happen to your collections after you’re gone? After all, as the cliché goes, you can’t take it with you.

Horvich: Yes, I definitely have made arrangements. My niece and nephew are the curators of my estate and will get my condo and its contents. We’ve talked about it — sometimes we’ll do what we call the “death walk,” where I’ll tell the stories and say, “This is a one-of-a-kind thing, it was $500 when I bought it, today it’s probably worth $5,000,” just so they know.

But I’ve told them that I don’t expect them to turn the condo into a mausoleum in my name. I said, “If there are things that you value, keep them; if not, get rid of them, sell them.” Since they’ll own the condo, they’ll have plenty of time to get antiques dealers and people who will offer them good prices.

They’ll also be approaching the Children’s Museum to see if they’d like to add to their collections, and I’ve already had conversations about that with the museum administration. So everything will be accounted for. In some ways, having everything go back into the stream and being available to other people for other reasons is kind of exciting.

Paul here. I have to say, I love that last comment from Horvich about other people getting to enjoy his stuff. And that’s on top of all the stuff he donated to the Children’s Museum! Some collectors can be very selfish — like, “Mine, mine, mine!” — but Horvich, for all his possessions, clearly has a strong spirit of generosity. As a collector myself, I find that pretty inspiring.

Big thanks (and happy birthday!) to Michael Horvich for sharing his story with us. You can learn more about him on his website.

Inconspicuous News Roundup

• Here’s a nice tribute to the restaurant guest check, which has become an increasingly endangered species in the digital era.

• Reader Matthew Algeo notes that there’s something very strange going on with the center ice design at the NCAA men’s hockey tournament. Check out this wayward comma:

• New stick figure in peril! Reader Janet Joachim spotted this one on a snow blower:

• Here’s another stick figure — not necessarily in peril, but still worth sharing:

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.

Note: This article includes several video clips that are essential to the story, so I strongly urge you to read the web version of the article, not the emailed version. — Paul

It’s hard to express how much I love the amazing artwork shown above. The colors, the textures, the geometry, the symmetry — so good! Even better, it’s made from the simplest of everyday objects: toothpicks, paper clips, and Q-tips. Better still, those objects rhyme: picks, clips, and tips!

Here’s a short but informative time-lapse video showing how the artwork was made:

The artist who made this piece is named Adam Hillman. I just became aware of him (he was featured in an article I recently read), but he’s been creating similar works for a long time, most of which lean heavily on those same elements — color, texture, geometry, symmetry, and everyday objects. Here are some additional examples:

Lollipops

Toothpicks

Bendy Straws

Gummy Bears

Cereal

Colored Pencils

Pins

Obviously, Hillman gets a lot of mileage out of food and small implements. But his range is wider than that. This next piece, made from phone charging cords, is basically all-white but is loaded with palpable texture:

Imagine how much obsessive precision it must have taken for Hillman to cut all those cords to just the right length and then get everything laid out just so. (I think we can safely say that he does not have a cat in his studio.) Similarly, it must have been a seriously painstaking task to burn all the matchsticks to the exact specifications needed for this next piece:

This next one might be my favorite. Think about how many pennies Hillman must have sorted through in order to find the right patinas for this color gradation:

The more I look at Hillman’s work, the more I think that the common theme isn’t actually geometry or colors or anything like that. Instead, I think the throughline here is the obsessive drive to organize things. When presented with a bunch of stuff, most of us just see, you know, a bunch of stuff. But Hillman sees a pattern waiting to happen. And once he envisions it, he feels the need to create it.

I don’t have Hillman’s visual talent (or patience), but I can relate to the organizing imperative. Think of some of the things I’m particularly enthusiastic about: uniforms, catalogs, style guides, collecting. All of those are about the satisfaction that comes from creating programmatic order out of chaos. I suspect many IC readers can relate to that as well.

You can see more of Hillman’s work on Facebook, on Instagram, and in this video:

Once I started looking at a lot of Hillman’s work, a bunch of other obsession-oriented artists started showing up in my Facebook feed. One who appears to be somewhat famous, although I wasn’t previously familiar with him, is a British painter named Noj Barker. He’s a bit of a specialist: He just paints dots. Like, lots and lots of dots:

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