Collecting can be vital to creativity because it’s a kind of low-key research, and research is fundamental to creativity. Collecting is a way to approach research without many hang-ups that, for some people, come with research. Collecting is more like a hobby.
I collect zines and small-run books. I’ve been reading zines since I was a teenager. I was a teenager before the internet, so zines provided information you couldn’t get otherwise. They also tend to be hyper-stylized, with distinctive aesthetics. Small-run books are similar. I collect these on any and all topics I’m even marginally interested in, such as art, craft, design, foraging, gardening, ecology, folklore, mending, technology, politics, gender, etc.
Whenever I have time in a city, I look for zines and small-run books. In some cities, I know the places to go. In Barcelona, it’s Fatbottoms. This is mostly a comic book shop, but the collection of comics is vast and includes many publications carefully made by hand, printed in unusual ways, with fantastic storylines. In New York, it’s Printed Matter. The last time I was in New York, I spent an entire afternoon there, thumbing through zines, books, and other ephemera. In Asheville, it’s Firestorm Coop—perhaps my favorite bookstore anywhere.
Collecting is part of my creative practice because it provides inspiration and learning. Zines and small-run books excite me because they meld form and content and offer different ways of writing and publishing. These publications also tend to be niche, an idiosyncratic view of a topic. Because of that, they also offer novel perspectives and insights. So, I collect these things because they prompt me to explore and reflect on how I’m creative and what I’m creative about.
What we collect doesn’t need to be a literal connection to what we do; it can be suggestive. I’ve begun collecting guitar pedals, mixers, and other audio production tools. Not because I know anything about music but because these tools are interesting to me to reflect on when thinking about creativity and how different kinds of inputs, outputs, and interactions can be strung together to make something expressive. Because they are different than the computational environment I usually work within, they stretch my imagination.
Collecting, then, is a simple way to study and explore what’s interesting to me. The material stuff of collecting is also useful because I can look back over it or even fiddle with it. Collecting keeps me attuned to the topics that interest me but without the urgency or seriousness that often accompanies more formal research. Maybe we can think of collecting as the playful counterpart to research. And play is good for cultivating our curiosity and creativity.