No plans tonight? The Brooklyn Historical Society is hosting a Collector's Night, with 20 collectors from across the five boroughs gathered together to "discuss and celebrate" the act of collecting. You'll find the usual amassor of presidential campaign memorablilia, plus some more unusual collections, like a man who collects specimen jars, archaic tools and objects picked up in cemeteries--letters, feathers, a dead bird, dried flowers, jewelry. (Bubblegum wrappers? Just wondering.) My favorite, though, the sight that just might tempt me to cross the bridge tonight, is "an assemblage of cockroach legs" cast aside by the owner's cat. That really stretches the definition of collecting and I would love to see how those skinny little legs are displayed. One might muse over the difference between this collection and the art of Damien Hirst. Are dead sharks inheriently more valuable? Hmmm. My cats kills the occasional stray water bug . . . I sense an opportunity. The first one who can consign a cockroach leg collection to respectable auction house wins.
Read the whole story at The New York Times: Where Cockroach Legs and Snow White Have Something in Common.