The Compleat Collector

When Douglas Rigby was a boy, an adventurous relative brought home some shrunken human heads from Peru. The memory of those heads, he claims, has prevented him from collecting anything himself--except facts about collectors. For the past seven years Douglas Rigby and his wife Elizabeth have been collecting just such facts. The result is a 517-page book, chock-full of photographs and line drawings: Lock, Stock & Barrel (Lippincott; $5), the first such history ever compiled.

What prompted Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to collect owls? Why do normally intelligent people collect cuspidors, garters, hearses, thimbles? Very simple, say the Rigbys: collecting is one of the basic instincts--animal as well as human (the proprietor of a London restaurant spent years blaming souvenir-hunting patrons for the disappearance of napkins; eventually he discovered that a fat brown rat had built a nest in the wall of the restaurant, there amassed a collection of 1,728).

Egypt's Tutankhamen collected walking sticks; Hermann Wilhelm Goering collects stag antlers. You can never tell what a collector is going to collect or why. A woman in Richmond avidly collects toy elephants-- for the excellent reason that her name is Mrs. L. E. Fant. The ferocious Ferrante, King of Naples, was fond of collecting his political enemies, whom he had executed, stuffed and mounted, and kept tastefully arrayed in a special room in his palace.

Lock, Stock & Barrel has considerable anecdotal value. It also has an interesting point: collecting is largely responsible for man's knowledge of himself--through the foundation of libraries and of great artistic and scientific museums.

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