Signing On

As an autograph collector, I can honestly say that all my favourite celebrities are dead. I like them that way: with their auras hermetically sealed. It’s only when celebrities die that we can start to appreciate their lives: what they did for us, how they suffered for their fame. In autograph terms, the death of the celebrity is key: the value of their signature depends on how early and tragic this is.

I used to like my celebrities alive. In fact, I liked them best when they were very, very old. As a star-struck child, I owned a celebrity map of Beverly Hills, and I used to draw my finger across the streets at bedtime, where their homes were marked with little stars. I imagined the security necessary to maintain their privacy. I pictured Actors’ Retirement Homes filled with superstars: George Burns striking up ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ on a Steinway upright, while Lucille Ball and Gloria Swanson gassed on the sofa, pumped up with make-up. I was not so much concerned with their quality of life, just comforted by the fact that they were continuing. Read more

Buying Hitler

On the psychpathology of the collector and the attraction of dictator art

Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would take such an opportunity? The dedicated collector of Holocaustiana? Someone seeking that elusive dinner party ice-breaker? Or a different kind of collector altogether, the military history kind? There are other more sinister things on the market too: Dr. Mengele’s diary, anyone?

As a Jewish manuscript dealer, there can be those awkward moments when autograph collecting merges effortlessly into Neo-Nazism. When that Floridian collector turned out to have a moat around his house, guns and fourteen signed portraits of Hitler on his wall, for instance. Oh, and that time when a young German dealer added to his display a schoolbook penned by the nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler. It’s hard to know how to respond at such moments—produce a Magen David and twiddle it nervously, smile at the embarrassing whiff of anti-Semitism and hope that it will all go away, or just call the police?

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