DISCOVERIES
Mongo
Adventures in Trash
Ted Botha
Bloomsbury USA: 242 pp., $23.95
Mongo, meaning “any discarded object that is retrieved,” according to “The Cassell Dictionary of Slang.” “It was not easy for me to discover collectors of mongo at first,” admits Ted Botha. “They go out at odd hours and have a knack of disappearing like a phantom or a cat in the night. You hear the garbage lid rattle, but when you look for them they are gone.” In France, they are called glaneurs, in Britain, gleaners, originally referring to those who harvested bypassed fruits in the fields.
Botha, who decorated his Manhattan apartment with discards when he moved there from South Africa, claims that New York has the world’s best mongo. It’s the combination of “wealth, residents living at close quarters, and the fact that so much gets thrown away out of lack of space.” Thirteen thousand tons of trash per day, carried away by men and women wearing suits labeled DSNY (Department of Sanitation, New York).
The gleaners are unforgettable: Mr. Murphy, who makes $10,000 each summer collecting cans at Central Park’s SummerStage; Dave Sludge, who once found a tricorn from the Revolutionary War, later valued at $9,000, in a landfill; or Charles, who collects pieces of “unwanted buildings.” This is recycling as art form. It is also political: a statement against waste, a vote for the old versus the new. As one street collector puts it, “Garbage isn’t in the eye of the beholder but in the way you arrange it.”
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To Have
and to Hold
An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting
Philipp Blom
Overlook: 274 pp., $15.95 paper
Philipp Blom grew up in the Netherlands, that strange home of the eclectic, a place where history is layered differently than anywhere else. His great-grandfather collected books and had an antiques shop in Amsterdam called the Yellow Finch.
“To Have and to Hold” is a history of collecting, from the heyday of Italian collectors and “Renaissance inquiry” in the 16th century to medical collections in Vienna and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries to the collections in the era of moguls, including J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, and to Joseph Duveen, who shaped so much of the current taste in museum collections in this country. (Duveen was famous for the quote “I smell fresh paint,” used to deter forgers.)
In the end, it is perhaps the book collectors that Blom finds most obsessive. It is, he writes, “the richest, most ambiguous form of collecting.... The lives of bibliomaniacs are rarely ever quaint and can be, in extremis, utterly alarming.”
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Caught in the
Current
Searching for Simplicity
in the Technological Age
Jay Bookman
St. Martin’s Press: 240 pp., $23.95
So a buncha guys go on a rafting-fishing trip every year for 10 years on the Deschutes River in central Oregon. Bookman, a journalist who has covered technology and science for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is a core member of the group of five, looks forward to this trip all year long.
“I’ve had a ringside seat at some of the most remarkable transformations in human history,” he writes, but all year long he can’t wait to leave his cellphone, watch and wallet behind and enter a world where he can smell the sagebrush and hear the river and feel the hot sun.
It’s not just nature that Bookman misses but also the storytelling and the sense of community he gets on the river. Sometimes, he writes, referring to the Internet, “communication displaces community.”
The real thrill of this book lies in its contagious passages describing long evenings spent setting up camp, cooking, talking and gazing at the stars. It’s in watching Bookman’s brother fall in love with a woman they meet rafting. I hate to say it, but it’s in the cold beer at the end of the day, the jokes and nicknames these guys have for one another and for parts of the river. Something about the world they go back to just breaks your heart.