How To Become a Collector

Image by Yuval Tebol

By Yuval Saar September 14, 2011

Crossposted from Haaretz

Image by Yuval Tebol

Glass objects, old watches, antique furniture, ivory sculptures, tin cans, Judaica items, inkwells, fountain pens, etrog boxes and walking sticks are just some of the arcana to be found in the home of artist and collector Emanuel Kipnis. Unlike most collectors, who usually focus on one area or one type of object, Kipnis collects everything, but only a little of each thing.

“A collector doesn’t wake up in the morning and declare I’m a collector. Becoming a collector is a long process that sometimes continues throughout the collector’s entire life, like me,” he says. “A collector is a kind of researcher who becomes interested in things, and does not always manage to understand what he is buying. It expands a person’s horizons. There are failures, but there are also a lot of successes, and that is also one of the reasons why I only collect a few of each object.”

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