Collections of Nothing
By William Davies King
University of Chicago $20, 164 pages

The Error World
By Simon Garfield
Faber £14.99, 247 pages

Oscar’s Books
By Thomas Wright
Chatto & Windus £16.99 370 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

The author of Collections of Nothing, William Davies King, is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (just a few miles from that exotic collector of exotic animals, Michael Jackson). King’s book opens, glumly: “On a hot summer day in 1998, I pulled up at the house I still owned with the woman who was soon to become my ex-wife ... There I was, 43, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt already heavy with sweat ... Ryder truck still hissing and ticking at my back.”

He has returned for his “stuff”, all neatly bundled into black bin-bags by his soon-to-be ex, the bulk of which contain “collections of nothing”.

King is a philosopher of pointless collecting. His book pivots on pregnant aphorisms that testify to a lifetime’s cogitation on the subject: “Collecting is a way of linking past, present, and future ... To collect is to write a life ... Collections are not merely owned, they are performed.” (I’m still wrestling with that last one).

Why, King ponders, do we gather and hoard essentially useless things? There are no obvious answers. Most of us collect – from the street person, with their shopping cart piled high with carefully bagged tat, to Charles Saatchi. In a newspaper, as I write, there is a feature on a German collector of kitchen toasters. (You can view this unmatched collection at www.toastermuseum.com.)

There are nowadays many varieties of memoir – some jollier than King’s, some fashionably miserable. And since most of us are wired to collect, the collecting memoir is a natural addition to the genre. In their different ways each of the books here investigate that universal trait.

King concludes that at the root of his own collecting fury is the existential fear of “nothingness”. He traces the angst to his childhood and a comfortable, but emotionally empty, family upbringing. The result is something between a memoir and a long, eloquent bleat about the human condition.

For some, collecting is pathologically regressive. “Anality”, observes King, drolly, “is not a subject I enjoy addressing but it has its place in my story.” For others, collecting is the noblest cultural achievement the human race can boast. One only has to marvel at the Frick in New York or the Wallace Collection in London, for example. Did Frick or Wallace collect for themselves or for us, one wonders?

After the usual apprenticeship in childhood collecting (stamps, baseball cards, comics, etc), King graduated to “the first real collection” of his adult life: “One day I started to save the labels of all the food products I consumed – cereal, soup, candy, beer. I did not keep the cans or jars, only the paper or cellophane or plastic labels.”

In one of Kings’s black bags are 110 tuna-can labels (including my own favourite when in southern California, Trader Joe’s Tongol Chunk Light). There have been times, King says, “when I have thought my collection should go to the Smithsonian, ‘the nation’s attic’. However, I am uncertain the Smithsonian would accept such a collection.”

King has been working on this memoir ever since that bin-bag day. Writing, along with four years of psychotherapy, has helped him back to what those not afflicted with his passion would call “normality”. He is now, as alcoholics would say, a “recovering collector”, who teaches a course on Collectors and Collecting.

The Error World opens on an even glummer note than King’s memoir. “My marriage is over,” Simon Garfield confides. “We have drifted apart over the years. I have fallen in love and am having an affair ... I am 47 and I can’t concentrate on anything for very long.”

But barely have we taken his marital predicament on board than Garfield’s book sheers off to tell us more than we may want to know about the joys of stamp collecting. Not common or garden philately, however. Garfield’s specialism is British postage stamps with printing imperfections or “errors” as philatelists call them.

At times the book reads like a Stanley Gibbons catalogue raisonnée. For example: “Several stamps were singled out for investment potential, including the 1929 George V Postal Union Congress £1 and the 1939 George VI ... and their price rose astonishingly within two years. In 1976, David Brandon [who was to philately what Yehudi Menuhin was to the violin] was selling a well-centred excellently perforated mint copy of the PUC £1 for about £700; three years later it was £2,500.”

Wow.

Of course, this is not a book about stamps any more than King’s book is about tuna-can labels. The subject of Garfield’s book is the psychology of his oddly illuminating addiction. “I lick, tweeze and mount pricy bits of paper in albums: therefore my marriage breaks up.”

Why, Garfield ponders, does he collect – what is driving him so obsessively? Permeated, as every page proclaims him to be, with guilt, he finally settles on a classic Freudian explanation (the great psychoanalyst was himself an avid collector of figurines). It’s all tied up with psychic crises of childhood, he says. Children, Freud observed, go through a collecting phase around puberty. The typically arbitrary things they collect are “transitional objects”, standing in for the lost mother in the lonely world of adulthood. Most children grow up and out of their collecting mania. Others, alas, do not.

Garfield was brought up in a middle-class family in which no one connected emotionally. Both his parents died before he was ready for grief: “As I think about my father dying, and my mother struggling with cancer, I find a new reason for my interest in collecting. Postage stamps offer one way in which we may order a world of chaos, and they have the power to bring a dependable meaning to a life.” For him, perhaps. For others, a stamp is just a stamp.

But mania, like depression, is contagious. As Garfield goes on, page after page, reliving the manic-depressive addiction of the error-connoisseur, one gets caught up in the thrill of the chase. And when, finally, he tracks down the Parliamentary 1s 3d Missing Blue that will crown his collection, the reader cheers with him. But then, common sense breaks in. For us, that is, not Garfield.

Try this: “You’re in a lifeboat. Your wife falls out of one side, your stamp album the other. You can save one but not the other. Which one?” For most of us, it’s the proverbial no-brainer. Read this book (I recommend you do) and you’ll never lick a stamp the same way again.

The most rational collecting is that of the book lover. It’s oddly hard to discard books. It’s a primitive thing, and nothing to do with the printed word – we discard newspapers and, most of us, tuna-tin wrappers, without a second thought. Books, we feel, define the essential us. Everyone has what Coleridge called a biographia literaria or literary biography – books that “made us”. This, Thomas Wright argues in Oscar’s Books, is how we can best pluck out the heart of the Oscar Wilde mystery. Wilde’s library is the true portrait in the attic.

Wilde’s books were inventoried and sold off at the time of his imprisonment for sodomy. Wright opens with a vivid depiction of that cruel day on April 24, 1895, in Tite Street when “a library, which had taken over 30 years to build, was destroyed in a single afternoon”. The dealers fell on their prey like ravening jackals. Books, Wright asserts, “were the greatest single influence on Wilde’s life and writings”. His heart was torn out and what remained was thrown to rot in Reading Gaol.

Wright reconstructs, as best a patient scholar can, the main building blocks in Wilde’s collection. It starts with his poet-mother, Speranza (who named her son after the hero of the Celtic epic “Ossian”) reciting folk songs and poems. The track continues with the primers that taught the abnormally precocious lad to read, the Latin and Greek that he first encountered at school. Had his tastes been less creative, he might have been a great classics scholar. Or had he not been infected by the late surge of poetic romanticism – Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti. Above all, at Oxford, the Parnassian cult of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance left its lifelong mark.

But for all that it reveals about Wilde, Wright’s book rather misses the point of the one-upmanship that drives the true collecting mania. Wilde’s collection, as shelved in his ground floor library in Tite Street, was not all that large. It was principally selected to impress. It was not a working library but a carefully dressed window display of Wilde.

Dig into the motivation of any dedicated collector and you will uncover two urges – to be either the only collector or the best collector. Who wants to be the second best collector of toasters or the “other” collector of tuna-can labels?

What we collect defines us. Particularly us males, as King points out. “Extreme collecting” is preponderantly a guy thing. We rebel, with postage stamps, tuna labels, and editions de luxe. And, of course, fail. Eccentric as these books are, they tell us much about the human condition. And much about how strange it is to be a human.

John Sutherland is the author of ‘Magic Moments: The Books the Boy Loved and Much Else Beside’ (Profile)