Check out today’s Google Doodle. Also — especially for those of us who sometimes worry about the distinctions between collector, archivist, and hoarder — a nice little longread for a Sunday evening:
BALLINA, Ireland — In this removed County Mayo town at the mouth of the River Moy, the widow of a local fish merchant decided one day to share her husband’s collection of Irish miscellany with the public. Better to have it on display here in his beloved Ballina, as he had always wished, than to lose it, God forbid, in a fire in the family home above the family shop, Clarke’s Salmon Smokery…
Ms. McCoole made her way down the town’s ancient commercial row to the home above the shop, where the sight of some old but unremarkable books left her wondering whether six weeks in Ballina would be a few weeks too long. But then the widow, Anne Clarke, led the skeptical scholar to her husband’s “locked room,” for many years off limits even to family. Inside were bundles and bundles wrapped in parcel paper; fish boxes and fish boxes packed with documents; stuff, and stuff, and more stuff.
Six weeks became six months, and then a year, and then — well, Ms. McCoole is still in Ballina nearly eight years later, still immersed in what is now known as the Jackie Clarke Collection: an astounding treasure of more than 100,000 items that provide an intimate retelling of Ireland’s long struggle to free itself of English rule. Fragile maps and rare newspapers, political posters and editorial cartoons, books, diaries, photographs, films, and even a scrapbook that Clarke began as a boy….
As the collection mesmerized historians and antiquarians, and as the provenance of central items became certain, Ms. McCoole’s academic skepticism gave way to what she calls “a gradual reveal.” The original plan had been to exhibit pieces of the collection in the town library, but local officials decided that something grander was in order, which is why, beginning in April, these artifacts will be on display in an 1882 bank building rechristened the Jackie Clarke Collection….
SiubhanDuinne
Thank you. I can’t express how timely and meaningful that lighthearted comment is for me. If I’m right, you may have changed a life tonight.
J
One terrific article! Thanks for the tip.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thank you for a wonderful long read, Anne Laurie.
Skerry
Wonderful! Thanks
mdblanche
An old Irish ballad, courtesy of Tom Lehrer.
Comrade Mary
That Doodle reminds me of this.
Svensker
That was wonderful. Thanks for posting.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Ha! I knew that my collection of Yugos would become a valuable resource.
Comrade Luke
Gonzaga Bulldogs, Number 1 seed in the West!
Woohoo!
Yutsano
@Comrade Luke: I’ll take that!!
MeDrewNotYou
I’ve had ‘Bitter Pill’ from Steven Brill at TIME on a tab* for a long time, but never had time to read it. Since Windows wanted to update today, I had to restart and all my tabs were reloaded. Unfortunately now the article is only available for subscribers. Anyone know where I could read it elsewhere? Or hell, even have the physical issue and doesn’t mind scanning 24k words? I’m a broke bum, and besides the issue is 2 weeks old.
*-I’m really bad with my tabs. I always leave Gmail open, along with this site, LGM, and others I read a lot so I can just hit refresh. An awful habit, I know, but now I’m completely used to not seeing my actual dektop for days.
Roger Moore
I think the distinction between a collector and a hoarder is fairly clear. A collector is somebody who acquires stuff because he wants it, while a hoarder is somebody who keeps stuff because he can’t bear to let it go. I think both of those are distinct from preppers, who get stuff because they think they’ll need it. And an archivist is somebody who keeps track of stuff for a collector. That underscores the difference between collector and hoarder. The collector cares about the individual items in the collection and wants to know exactly what’s in it, while the hoarder doesn’t really care that much about the items, they just can’t bear to let anything out of their possession.
Anne Laurie
@SiubhanDuinne: The local commentariat — i.e., “people who worry others won’t accept their long historical memories without thorough documentation” — did kinda seem a target market, yes?
(Also, Spousal Unit & I are both packrats, we’ve lived in this house for 20 years, and it’s spring-cleaning season.)
Anne Laurie
@Roger Moore:
If you read the article, it’s pretty clear Mr. Clarke’s relatives regarded him as a hoarder with enough money to keep him out of the grip of social services. “Wolfe Tone’s actual fabric cockade? Who in their right minds would care about random crap like that? A ‘a rare, original copy of the 1916 Easter Proclamation’? Just look it up, on the internet!”
CaseyL
What a delightful article – and what a treasure that man put together! The article doesn’t say if the documents are in English or Gaelic; I’m guessing the earlier ones, especially, use the latter language – ?
Imagine trying to work on unearthing 21st Century Western culture 300 or 400 years from now. I can’t help but wonder what those future anthropological historians will work with. People just don’t keep diaries anymore (blogs and livejournals aren’t the same; diaries were private); seldom write letters; and most of our everyday communication and commerce are now electronic.
Poopyman
Thanks for this, AL. We’re Mayo people. The Immigrant left in 1842. I’ve been to Ballina (Baaly-NA) too. Nice place.
Litlebritdifrnt
I was a terrible hoarder, refusing to throw away anything, until Hurricane Floyd and the flooding of the house in 1999. I realized then that “stuff” is really just “stuff” and you really can live without it. Since then I have been a bit of a stickler for going through the wardrobe once a year and donating clothes I haven’t worn for a year. I also go through books etc., and other miscellaneous stuff and getting rid of it. My life has been much more sane since. Speaking of which I found a really good tip on one of my Mother Nature Network sites the other day. The “reverse coat hangar” trick. Place all of your clothes on coat hangars facing backwards in the closet. When you wear it and wash it place it back on the hangar facing forwards. Once a year go through your closet and take out all of the backwards facing hangars and donate the clothes. If you haven’t worn them for a year then chances are you are never going to wear them. (I make an exception for all my court suits, because I only have to wear them rarely, but should I have a Federal Court case that requires a week or two in court then I need a weeks or two worth of suits.).
scav
@Roger Moore: Nice distinctions. Where’d you put someone who amasses stuff because it,s being tossed by others and there just might be information in there that somebody somewhere at another time might need? (detail, at one point this did include travel leaflets and advertisement flyers, comprehensive). The checking out of library books to up their circulation numbers makes perfect sense, but I’d still like a good word to describe the phenomena.
Roger Moore
@Anne Laurie:
And I think they were wrong. Not everyone has, or understands, the collector’s mentality, but it’s actually quite different from a hoarder’s. A collector wants stuff either because it’s rare (which obviously includes historically unique items), because it’s part of a a bigger whole, or both. A collection is not just a random set of items that have come into the collector’s possession; there’s thought involved, priorities about what is more and less important, and ideas about what other acquisitions might make the collection better.
That’s very different from a hoarder. A hoarder keeps stuff because they can’t bear to give it up, even if it has no obvious value. Some hoarders themselves can’t tell you what conceivable reason they might want or need the things they have. They’ll keep things that have little or no value even when they’re taking up valuable space. I knew somebody who kept unused flavor packets from ramen noodle packages, even though he never used them. That’s hoarding.
That’s not to say that people fall 100% into one category or the other. Somebody may collect one kind of thing and hoard another, and a mild tendency to hoard stuff is probably helpful (“I should keep that around for a while; it might come in handy.”) And there’s always a tendency to put something in the back of the closet assuming that you’ll keep it for a while just in case, only to find it years later and barely remember why you had it in the first place. But that’s really quite different from making a deliberate attempt to get specific stuff, even if the people around you don’t understand why you care.
K488
@Anne Laurie: Ms K488 and I are also both packrats, and we’re moving after more than 20 years in this house (and after 30 years at my soon-to-be-previous institution). A move’s as good as a fire, they say…
greenergood
Google ‘Ceide Fields, Mayo’ for access to many websites focusing on an archaeological site about 30 miles west of Ballina, that’s probably one of the oldest agricultural sites in Europe. I met one of the original archaeologists 35 years ago when the site was still completely undeveloped. He’d written to the Irish Sites and Monuments Department asking if there’s been any interest in the site, and they’d replied that they had received a letter 30 years before that they’d never acted upon, which ended up being from the archaeologist’s father. NW Mayo is an amazing place, one of the most beautiful in Ireland – and in the process of being shafted by Shell for ‘natural’ gas access: http://www.shelltosea.com/
PLH in NYC
Thank for pointing me to the Clarke article. Fascinating in a way that the Collyer brothers is not.
Roger Moore
@scav:
That sounds more like hoarding than collecting, but I’d have to know more details. If the person who got the items just grabbed them because somebody else was throwing them away and they thought they might be useful, they’re probably a hoarder. If they actually go to the trouble of figuring out what’s in the stuff they gather and know enough about it that they could actually find the information in the event somebody somewhere wants it, they’re a collector.
Spaghetti Lee
@CaseyL:
I sometimes joke with my friends that the presence of all those animal memes will mean that future historians will think that mankind returned to animism and nature worship in the early 21st century as a response to economic upheaval.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Thanks Anne,that is a cool story.
The Pale Scot
Up the RA.
scav
@Roger Moore: Oh fink, he falls in the middle. Clearly the intent and soul of a collector (sometimes bad with followthrough) but indiscriminate in his heuristic gathering technique. I do like the complicated ones.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@greenergood:
Southern Mayo ain’t half bad either, especially if you aren’t into mountains and cliffs. One of the maternal great-grandfathers hailed from Cong. Quite the beautiful place.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
People may not write many letters these days, but we do write tons of email, and it’s incredibly easy to keep all your email correspondence, both sent and received. Similarly, some people keep every draft of everything they write. And companies like Google and Facebook store absurd amounts of data about everything with do. The average person today probably produces a lot more raw material for future historians than people did at any point in the past. The main question is how well that data is going to be preserved. If we somehow manage to keep it in a format that future historians can access, they’ll have more problems from having too much information than too little. If not, we’ll be creating a new dark age that historians will always have trouble understanding.
Librarian
@Roger Moore: In order to be an archivist, one has to go to library school and get a degree. It’s a professionally trained position.
Elizabelle
@MeDrewNotYou:
Ridiculous that Time magazine put Steven Brill’s healthcare opus behind a subscriber’s paywall. It was a public service.
However, I’d made a PDF and just emailed it to Anne Laurie. Maybe you could email her and she can send it along to you.
When I see something really cool, I generally make a PDF in the event it disappears off the intertubes.
MeDrewNotYou
@Elizabelle: Thanks so much! And that’s actually not a bad idea, I might try that when I don’t have the time to read something right away.
Linnaeus
@Roger Moore:
As a historian myself, that’s something I think about more and more as of late.
The Pale Scot
A good paddy day story about the Irish step dancers of Brooklyn.
Keltic Dreams
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2008/03/13/nyregion/1194817100765/keltic-dreams.html
Petorado
It’s the guys like Jackie Clarke that allow the rest of us to see the fabric of history by saving all of the threads. A grandfather was on a similar voyage and retraced family history back over 350 years. The details he recovered now tells my son the story, in part, of how he came to be over the course of 4 centuries, thanks to my grandfather. That journey ended when some guy with a silly little mustache decided to go invading other countries.
dance around in your bones
@MeDrewNotYou:
This is really late and you might never see it, but there’s an add-on for Firefox called “Pocket” (used to be called Read it Later)that will save things you want to read (even offline if you so chose) that saves stuff you want to read later so you don’t have to keep a tab open.
I found it indispensable when I had limited access to the Internet. I just saved everything to read offline for when I had no Internet hookup.