What do you learn about someone through their collections? Can you speculate that someone who collects records is nostalgic? Is it a stretch to say a stamp collector wants to travel? I am not much for psychoanalysis (being a patient rather than a student of it), and I do think one can get a bit carried away. Someone who collects model train sets surely doesn’t spend all their spare time contemplating trolley problems.
I do know it’s easy to judge people by their collections. I never quite understood people with collectable spoons. Then again, I collect books by the yard that I probably won’t ever start, let alone finish.
I learned recently that the word for one who collects thimbles is digitabulist. While even less practical than spoons, there is something lovely about collecting thimbles, I imagine. I can see a vast hoard of them somewhere, neatly dusted, on an eccentric’s shelf. A whole row of homes in miniature, promising a modicum of protection with no pretensions.
As a cofounder and the editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine, I am tempted to call myself a digitabulist. But that’s not quite right. I don’t want to say I collected the artists and wordsmiths here. That feels both clinical and condescending. Gather is a better word, perhaps, than one that means to collect.
Here, then, is a gathering of thimbles. Thank you for looking.
