This is the second essay in a collection of twelve written by Byron Ferris for the "Design Sense" feature of the Sunday Northwest Magazine insert of The Oregonian during 1984 and 1985. – Ed.
Recently London's Victoria and Albert Museum showed a collection of objects formed in plastic. The shapes of the items — pens, phones, kitchen utensils and calculators — were appropriate to their functions, examples of living design at work.
Closer to home, Ron Brentano, curator of technology for the Oregon Historical Society, reports that the society has put aside a few plastic items to add to its old celluloid — yes, that was an early form of plastic - backings for hand mirrors and dresser sets and even older frames for daguerrotypes and tintypes. A small table radio — almost a prototype radio — and examples of scrimshaw-like artwork, done on plastic, form parts of the society's more modern plastic collection.
Except for the "scrimshaw." the items seem to be pretty functional — plastic lends itself to some pretty fussy stuff, it's true, but also to some good design that is both practical and attractive.
All this set me to thinking about collectibles in general. Personally, I've always wondered what to collect. I know stamp-collectors and painting-collectors, and significant signatures have turned out to be terribly valuable on the collectors' market.
My family didn't collect Picasso paintings, and I didn't collect the work of Louis Bunce. I bought a copy of the first Walt Disney comic book, though — 10 cents and threw it out once I'd read it. Today, a mint condition original Mickey Mouse is worth about $500 on the collector's list. What did a 12-year-old kid know?
On the question of what object to collect for future value, I interviewed Kenneth and Shielagh Adshead, curators of the International Archives in BoIton, England. Their task is to preserve the great works of visual design from all over the world. Great Britain established the archives in response to the realization that many of the influential works of the Bauhaus, a great German school of design, were destroyed by the Nazis in Berlin in 1936.
Now the collection includes inventive posters from Poland, amazing prints from Japan, beautifully designed ads and products from Europe and the United States and a full library of slides of worldwide examples. But how do they know what to collect.
Ken said, "It is a problem. The marvelous tea tins of the 1890s, litho-printed on metal, are now quite valuable, if one can find them. They were objects of use and thrown on the dust bin once emptied. The few that survive fetch a pretty price. That raises a great question for us in our time. Will today's Atari posters be considered socially significant in the future? I wouldn't have thought that the unctuous glorified cartoons of your painter Norman Rockwell would now be considered to be part of Americana.
Now here's a thought: In this problem of what will be precious and valuable in the future, perhaps we should turn to plastics. Almost all today's plastics formulations come from the petroleum industry and we're warned that the supplies of oil are being used up on our planet, that the fossil fuels that govern our energy, transportation and plastics activities are finite.
What a fascinating realization. When the last gasoline-powered car sputters to a haIt in the next century — if the doom-sayers are right — plastics will still be there. Many plastic formulations are chemically inert and stable, and nature, with all its forces, can't break them down. Acrylics and nylon may remain as permanent in the environment as silver and gold.
My advice is to start collecting plastic now. When the Earth's oil reserves are used up, our great grandchildren may honor plastic objects as being of high value. Those little plastic pieces that surround us may be of great value in the 21st century. This strange phenomenon of turning the ordinary products of former ages into Art has happened throughout human history. The Portland Art Museum has an extensive collection of ancient Roman coins and decorated vases.
Can you imagine how valuable a necklace of toothpaste caps could be in the 22nd century, or a spangled dress of those little squares that lock our bread wrappers? Maybe high style will be rings that are really today's cores from rolls of transparent tape, or a body draping of hula-hoops, if all the hoops haven't already been thrown out. How about saving those perforated seals from detergent bottles? They come in all colors — tomorrow's jewelry? A friend and I are saving those rolly things from roll-on deodorant caps. They're beautiful.
Personally, I'm saving all my out-of-date credit cards. When electronic banking finally takes over, plastic money may well have as much historic significance as ancient Roman coins.