Old Paper

I’ve been going down a collage rabbit hole lately and now I’m starting to collect old paper.

What is it with old paper? And why collage?

I’ve been thinking about that for the last couple weeks as I’ve been “preparing” to start making collages. I’m pretty good at preparing, especially when preparation consists of finding Etsy stores that sell “vintage scrapbooking supplies” and visiting the mostly-empty, strange-feeling, Covid-era Flohmärkte (flea markets) looking for Krimskrams (bric a brac) that aren’t crazily over-priced. Flohmarkt vendors are happy to sell you one 1950s photograph for a Euro, but when you’d rather buy the whole shoebox full, that’s where my haggling skills break down.

Even so, just this past Saturday I scored with a treasure trove of old letters - and spent a half hour talking to Charlie, a German man in his 60s (70s?) who was excited to talk about the US and, natürlich, the recent election. As Caroline will tell you, I cannot talk about US politics any longer, but when they’re brought up a German man who lived through the Cold War, I’m going to listen and answer his questions.

But about the paper (I predict I’ll have more stories about Charlie in future posts), is it as simple as it not being digital? Kind of. What I’m realising as I page through an album of 1950s vacation photographs or a cardboard box of old letters, is that there’s only one of each of them. Just one. And when it’s gone, or torn up to be used in a collage, or left behind in a move (and winds up back in a Flohmarkt), there’s not another one like it.

That’s a little frightening, or at least sobering. And it partially explains why I’ve been doing such a good job of finding all these papers but not actually using them.

All of these old papers (photographs, playbills, receipts) had a meaning to someone, which is now lost. When I page through them, I find meaning - but such different meaning than the author (probably) intended. I geek out over how different papers yellow, and about the typography in letterhead stationary from business long gone-under. I love the stories someone can read into a photograph of a stranger - when surely to the photographer that person was no stranger. I want to know more about the stories written in the letters, but the only way I can do that is to make them up myself.

So when I pause before cutting up a hand-addressed envelope, I’m worried about cutting it into a useless shape - thus ruining it as a “graphic”. I’m also worried about doing one more disservice to whoever wrote that letter, the letter that’s now in my hands, ignorant to the story it tells. And I can’t help but remember that there is only one. This letter exists one time, in one place, in my hands.

I want to do a good job by it.