Object permanence

Coveting your friend's sticker

I love the artist Lisa Hanawalt’s Patreon newsletters, and this week she wrote one about stickers. She posts pages of her old sticker book and says about it:

This book has the most powerful psychic and totemic energy of anything in my house. It's a religious object that floods me with girlish glee and "bored in the suburbs" ennui.

Collections have that power, don’t they - to the non-collector a sticker is just a sticker, a stamp just a stamp. To the ardent collector they are magical items, imbued with the chase, the trade, the story, the longing.

I wish that I’d held onto my various collections, like Lisa did with her stickers. I went through coins, stickers, rocks and shells. The coins are a collection I really regret parting with. When I moved flats in my 20s, my best friend Ella and I went to a numismatist near Leicester Square in London. (I’d looked him up in the Yellow Pages, at the same time discovering what a numismatist is.) We took a box of my lesser coins, and my more special collectors’ book. He had a look through (disappointingly, without putting on a loupe) and offered me £30 for the lot. We took the money and left, and discussed what would happen if we doubled back and, poking our heads round the window, discovered him Scrooge McDucking about in my coin collection, shouting with glee about the rubes he’d just defrauded.

In my school we collected fuzzy stickers - small guys that came four to a mini sheet, covered with flocking. We’d keep them in the plastic sleeves of photo albums, and get them out between classes to show each other. I only had two to three friends who were remotely interested in this pursuit, so we were rather a closed, intimate trading ring, with things going back and forth and only getting a bit interesting if someone’s mum could be persuaded to take them to some local sticker merchant (stationery store) on the weekend.

Stickers I have known (made)

One of my friends had a raccoon fuzzy. How she came by it is a story lost to the mists of time. It held mystery: on its own, parted from its three sheet-mates - its tail was a bit loose, its fuzz a bit faded - it was a thing of beauty. I’m not sure that in the 30+ years since, I have ever longed for an object quite so much. When I picture it now, I can still feel a rush of covetous excited energy.

My friend wouldn’t trade it for ages, until something (I wish I could remember what) greater came along and she finally relinquished the raccoon into my grubby photo album. Months later, after we’d moved onto collecting Filofaxes and their inserts (we were about 12. Will it amaze you to hear we weren’t the coolest girls in our year group?) my local store got in some raccoon sticker sets. There they were - four to a sheet, tails firmly attached, fuzz bright and new. The value of my hard-won raccoon immediately depreciated. An important lesson for me in the market power of scarcity.

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Even while I loved stickers, I was uneasy about them. There are two main ways to love a sticker, I guess: you keep it, like we did, in Gollumy-style, and get it out only to crow over your friends or caress it in the quiet of your tween bedroom. Or: you stick it! Perhaps the world is divided into these two types of people? Either way, there’s an anxiety - you do the former, and know somewhere in your heart that the sticker is not doing what it was born to do. Or you commit, inevitably putting it somewhere you wish you hadn’t, and watching as time scrapes and erodes it. For me, as the former type of person, it was probably my earliest brush with commitment-phobia.

From a photo of Maud Wagner, circus performer and first known female tattooist in the US.

Speaking of WHICH - I just got two tattoos on my arms. I had one already which I got aged 20 on my hip - it was a lizard, and now is a formless blob. I’ve wanted some more for a while, but the admin (finding someone reputable and… well, that’s it really) seemed exhausting. But last week I took the leap, and now have one of my fave Springsteen songs and a Gary Larson alien to show for it.

But I’ve enjoyed thinking that the commitment of these tattoos is 26 years less than with my last one. If I’m lucky, these guys will be with me for 40ish more years, as opposed to the 66ish years last time. LOWER COMMITMENT! Perhaps in another 20 or so years I’ll get an enormous back tattoo, and really it will matter even less. RISE UP, MES AMIES, AND COVER THYSELVES IN TATTOOS, FOR IT’S LATER THAN WE THINK!

After a painting by Norman Rockwell

Thank you for reading, until soon!