Description

Collectors, archivists and obsessives: is there a method to their madness? Unlikely Treasures features people who collect unexpected things like clothespins, platform shoes and discarded teatags, and intimate discussions about the compulsion to collect and the urge to create order out of chaos. You think staplers aren’t worth collecting? Think again.

Meet Dorothy Globus, a curator at New York’s Museum of Arts & Design who has hundreds of collections… including staplers and a loft full of objects. Her treasure trove is a testament to the design of everyday things.

There’s Billy Mavreas, whose Montreal store houses everything from his collection of old electronics manuals to his binders of doodles; Kyle Supley, a collecting savant whose main interest is household electronics — everything from clocks to toasters; Marilynn Gelfman Karp, New York author of In Flagrante Collecto, whose collections of tiny found street objects are transformed into beautiful spheres and Dave Ouellet, a collector of kitsch records and ridiculous items.

A visit to the City Reliquary in Brooklyn, where collectors bring their objects to be displayed for all to see, the New York flea market where collectors find things they never even knew they wanted, and Greensboro, North Carolina, where one woman’s three-storey collection of stuff has been transformed into spectacular works of art is enough to make any collector drool...

Unlikely Treasures will take you on a trip to meet fascinating characters, getting inside their minds and their drawers of stuff.