Naughty bits

THERE’S a box of porn in my basement. I don’t want to say how big a box because, hey, size shouldn’t matter. Let’s just say it’s smaller than it might be and bigger than it ought to be.

Most of the porn in that box predates the relationship I’m in now, and I haven’t, er, consumed any of it in years, but I’ve hauled it from one home to another -- eight moves total -- in the last decade. I don’t look at it, I don’t like moving it ... so why can’t I bring myself to throw it away?

British novelist Geoff Nicholson lays out a theory in his new book, “Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of ‘Erotica.’ ” I am a sex collector, distinctly lower case, and I hold onto my porn because it represents more than a means to an end.

Before Nicholson introduces us to his sex collectors -- the only traits they seem to have in common are having too much time and too much money on their hands -- he wrestles with a more fundamental question: Why do people amass collections at all? What motivates the man who collects toy trains? Or the woman who collects cats, live or porcelain? Nicholson quotes Sigmund Freud, who saw sex -- no really, sex! -- in there somewhere: “When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuff-boxes, the former is finding a substitute for the need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for -- a multitude of conquests.”

But if a snuff-box collection is about sublimated sexual desire, Nicholson asks, what on earth is a Linda Lovelace memorabilia collection about? Or a collection of plaster casts of rock stars’ penises? “If collecting is a nonsexual equivalent, then what are we to make of collections that are in themselves sexual?” Nicholson asks. “You can be as proud as you like of your stamp collection, and you can talk about it in terms of passion, lust, appetite, satisfaction, and so forth, but the one thing you can’t do (unless you’re weird to an off-the-map extent) is get aroused by it.”

Sex collectors are not, or can’t be, in a continual state of arousal as they build, catalog, arrange, dust and display their collections, so what are we to make of them? What’s going on in their heads, apartments, private museums? A great many people “think all collecting is weird and sad per se,” Nicholson admits, and are therefore inclined to view sex collecting as “weird, sad, and pervy,” but he isn’t having it. We are all, he argues, sex collectors to some extent. (Is there a box of porn in your basement?) It’s just that some of us are more passionate, more organized and more articulate about it than others.

The most interesting collector in the book is Naomi Wilzig, a 69-year-old Jewish widow who lives outside Tampa, Fla. Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, Nicholson catalogs the art in Wilzig’s guest room: “Pre-Raphaelite nudes in sylvan settings, and in a more modern style there’s a painting of a pair of naked women scrambling down a steep rocky slope. More modern still, and way more garish, is a painting of Bettie Page done in electric primary colors.... There’s plenty of overtly gay male stuff.... There are lesbian scenes, too, naturally, including one involving an enema.”

Jet-lagged or not, who could possibly sleep in Wilzig’s guest room?

Unlike the men’s magazine collector profiled toward the end of the book, Wilzig got involved before the Internet, which simplified collecting but also drained the romance from it. Wilzig’s collection was amassed not late at night sitting in front of a computer but on long buying trips, often to Europe, where she boxed up nude figurines, sexual automatons and fetish masks and sent them home to Florida. In fact, she began almost by accident. One of her sons asked her to buy him a nude painting while she was on a trip to Europe, and “having bought that first erotic painting, Naomi decided to buy herself a few more. Then she bought a male nude to keep them company.” The rest, as they say, is history.

After Wilzig, Nicholson introduces us to a crowd of collectors, with fascinations that run the gamut from burlesque memorabilia to erotic automatons. Like all obsessives, they can be a bit long-winded when you get them cranked up about their passions. The same is true of Nicholson, who collects sex collectors, a realization we arrive at early on, although he doesn’t come to it himself until the book’s final paragraph. It doesn’t help that Nicholson gamely puts the same question to all his collectors, a question that is as unnecessary as it is unanswerable: Why? Why 80,000 girlie magazines? Why dirty bookplates? Why pulp novels?

Equally problematic is his decision to organize the book by themes -- some of them strained (“Women and Museums,” “The Dealer and the Dealt With,” “Collecting the Self and Others”) -- rather than personalities. Instead of profiling the collectors, Nicholson devotes entirely too much time to rummaging through their collections. At times, he is also too respectful. He’s treading on delicate territory, since these people are opening their homes and, in some instances, the most intimate aspects of their psyches. Still, by constantly reassuring us of their basic decency, he presumes a degree of prudishness on his readers’ part that seems unlikely. This is a book that will be read by people who derive a certain pervy pleasure from the limitless capacity of humans to be, well, pervy, and he needn’t make excuses for his subjects’ interests.

In his zeal to spend time with sex collectors, Nicholson rushes past some stories that seem infinitely more interesting. Does the Wig Club of Edinburgh really have a wig made from the pubic hair of Charles II’s mistresses? Nicholson says it’s probable, but he doesn’t investigate, preferring to meet another collector who is, to my reading, much less compelling than the possibility of that wig. And what about Jesus’ foreskin, “so much the ultimate collector’s item that at one time there were a dozen or so of them in circulation”? I wanted to read more about Henry Hayler, whose London homes were raided by police in 1874, yielding “over 130,000 photographs and 5,000 slides, and ... correspondence from satisfied customers all over Europe and America. According to press reports, Hayler, his wife, and two sons were recognizable in ‘the more offensive pictures.’ ”

But these are relatively minor quibbles in a book that is often quite enjoyable to read.

Collecting, Nicholson writes, is “a form of preservation, a method of keeping order, a way of keeping chaos and death at bay.... [W]e’re all engaged in what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the struggle with dispersion.’ ... The collector brings things together in the full knowledge that sooner or later they will be dispersed. But while the collection exists, while the collector controls it, the chaos is being kept at bay. When that collection is a sexual one, there’s also the possibility for eroticism and arousal, and, for want of a better term, erotic joy.”

It is rare to meet a serious collector -- no matter what the object of his or her affections -- who isn’t a bit odd. That Nicholson draws such a charming group portrait of these odder-than-most collectors makes it impossible not to share their joy.