“You can’t breathe all the air” —Peter Bovin
Complete collection is death.
When the last piece is found and added to the stash, that’s it, there’s no more. The end has been reached. And then what?
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My late friend Peter taught me about the Picking World. He lived, breathed, and died in it. One day at work, he had a second heart attack and didn’t make it, kneeling over another set of possible things to collect. But he knew his limits; he knew that to amass all of something meant that there’d be no one to share it with. robbing it of the fun.
What’s the point of collecting cards if you cannot trade? If you have them ALL, who will you trade with? Who will you talk to about them? No one will care if you have them all and no one else has any.
If you collect all the purple glass in the world, who will you buy from when you want to get more? It’s already yours.
The community of collectors vanishes. They have nothing left because it all belongs to one ultra-collector. The fun must wait for the inevitable estate sale. Or heist.
Complete collection is death!
So rather than covet collecting to completion, revel in the sharing, the giving away and possibly getting back from someone (else).
This bound summons our inner Ariel (yes, i have been hanging out with my five-year-old, please forgive) and enjoying our grottoes filled with supplies. It asks us to use what we have and share it with the pieces we make, to destroy the aim for a complete collection and use up the supply in making. Make room for more, other, fresh…
(okay so for you wordsmiths out there, yr supply is effectively endless, but if you are Canadian poet Christian Bök, who set up a challenge for himself, that supply in fact was finite, and produced a glittering suite of poems in Eunoia).
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An aside: whoever said that collecting supplies and not using them is its own hobby… stop calling us out, ok?
also, whoever else brought up ADHD-fueled “Hobby Graveyards” can also sit down right now. The nerve!
Back to the main story…
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What portion(s) have you gathered? What bits can you bestow to make room for what you’re about to receive as we circulate our goods?
Those leather scraps, those few pieces of papermaking supply, that stack of bottle caps waiting for a hammer and some grommets? What do you have to share?
A local treasure shop here gets all of its inventory from donations. People destash so that others can swoop it up, give it new life, and get the thrill of the cheap find that makes the je ne sais quois of the next piece.
This week, it’s not just an inhale, a taking in, and getting. It’s a giving, an exhale, a seeing what you aren’t really working with and feeling that dopamine hit that only generosity can bestow.
From what I could tell in the short time I knew him, the real pleasure of the Picking World wasn’t the antique tools, or vintage baubles, or the semi-truck of silk flowers that took something like a decade to finally sell, weekend after weekend, at the Chelsea Flea Market, it was the way people responded when they found their slice of the treasure. It was people first, things second, but the things brought pleasure to the people, and so the circulation, the subtle stirring and resifting of possessions, really drove the work. The hunt for hidden quality and delivering resurrection.
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While looking up the etymology of share, I found a couple of meanings that rest just outside the idea of to enjoy a portion alongside an other… an archaic forking (as in to shear, the split off from the whole) that humans have in the pubic region (share-bone being an old word for pubis), and references to the kinds of shares one exchanges on the stock market, you know those shareholders whose pleasure we break our backs to sustain, whose demands devour the environment and so much else besides…
“You can’t breathe all the air.”
Right now, let’s circulate what we can, invigorate each other with fresh oxygen, and multiply our collective possibilities. And see what we can make once we have remixed our palettes and partitioned our holdings afresh.
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See you again in a week, on October 13, 2025. And if you like the Bound Report, go ahead and share it with people you think might like it too.
Truly..."also, whoever else brought up ADHD-fueled “Hobby Graveyards” can also sit down right now. The nerve!"
After 6 years, I've finally moved into a home where I can unpack my stash, and while I don't yet have a place to sort and create, I can hardly wait to dig into those boxes and start making things again. I think I'll also be able to decide what really belongs in the graveyard (or Goodwill) and what I'm still itching to work with.