Notes: An Acre of Pins
HOARDS ARE MYTHIC, turning up in everything from Milton (“The unsunn’d heaps / Of miser’s treasure”) to Raiders of the Lost Ark. They are also quite real. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylonia, was a passionate collector of valuable artifacts, and he put them on display. Nabonidus was surely not the first to yield to such impulses, and he was obviously not the last. Scholars have dug up hoards in unlikely places all over the world and have learned about everything from traditional trade patterns to ancient notables and events, but they have rarely discovered why the objects were collected and deposited where they were.
All of this came to mind not long ago when I met two latter-day Naboniduses, a couple named Bill and Julie Nelson, of Tucson, Arizona, and saw their enormous hoard-in-progress, which, if it were suddenly to be buried by some frightful cataclysm, would no doubt delight and baffle a future Carnarvon or Carter. I had happened on, and been strangely taken with, a copy of The Other Newsletter, one of three publications, each part newsletter and part mail-order catalogue, that Bill Nelson publishes for collectors of lapel pins. Sets of twelve miniature Los Angeles Police Department badges are selling for $96, I learned. Write a friendly letter to Zenith Electronics or Pepsi or the mayor of Boston and you’ll get back a free pin. Most of the items in the newsletter were introduced by a silly bit of trivia or maxim: “Happiness is having a scratch for every itch. That’s how Ogden Nash described the happy position of the rich and famous. Here’s two Olympic pins that you don’t have to be rich to afford. ...”
Soon afterward I visited Tucson and, curious, took the opportunity to look the Nelsons up. As I discovered later, their mail-order business, founded three years ago, is the nation’s—maybe the planet’s—largest pin distributorship.
“PIN COLLECTING is the fastestgrowing hobby in the world,” Bill Nelson told me. “More than two hundred and fifty million pins are in circulation in the world today.” That’s one pin for every twenty human beings. “People like three kinds of pins,” Nelson said. “Olympics are the best, Disney is next, and Coke is next. And it’s nice if you can get two of them together”—as on pins showing Sam, the mascot of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, holding a bottle of Coke. Having been rejected by the committee as too commercial, these pins have gone on to prove the committee right: recently they were valued at up to $1,700 apiece.
It was apparently the 1984 Olympics that got many people, notably the Nelsons, thinking about pins the way Vladimir Nabokov thought about butterflies, the way Jay Gatsby thought about shirts. The official pin licensee for those Games, a Los Angeles company named Ooh La La!, produced some 30 million Olympic pins and was richly rewarded for its vision when as many as 20,000 people a day jammed the tents that had been set up in a parking lot near the L.A. Coliseum to accommodate pin swapping and selling. Among the throng in the pin tents were the Nelsons, who appeared with $65 worth of pins that they’d bought at the UCLA bookstore— their very first pins. They started to swap. After they returned home, they continued to swap, by mail.
Bill Nelson, who ten years ago, at the age of thirty-seven, retired for health reasons as a professor of marketing, told me, “I was just having a good time. The last thing I ever wanted to do was go to work, let alone start a business.” But one thing led to another, and pretty soon he and Julie had the newsletters (P.O. Box 41630, Tucson, Ariz. 85717), whose readership is now 50,000; a trademark on the phrase “Fellow Collectors”; and enough pin-guide booklets, pin carrying cases, and pin frames, not to mention pins, to fill a large workroom and two small warehouses. Lay out the Nelsons’ pins a few inches apart and they’d cover an acre.
Most of the duplicates are, naturally, inventory. But the Nelsons also have their private stock, as Bill hints coyly in the newsletters. “I just showed this pin to Julie,” he writes, “and I don’t think I’ll get it back.” It may well be characteristic of people in the pin business that they hoard pins. The wife of the man who won the Canadian pin franchise for the Calgary Olympics has a collection of 7,000 pins pertaining to the sport of curling.
WHY PINS? ONE might as well ask, Why any hoard? Why is the hall closet full to bursting with shopping bags? Why have elderly cousins, according to press reports that appear from time to time, turned their house into a catacomb of newspapers? “I don’t understand why people do a lot of the things they do,” Nelson said when I put the question to him. “People like to collect things, and pins are so logical. What else can you buy for five or six dollars that’s as nice as this?” He gestured across his desk toward a brightly colored pin of a cartoon tiger—Hodori, the mascot of the Seoul Olympics—playing table tennis.
What else indeed? In a more perfect world, of course, there would be lots of things as nice. But in this world, where for many the means to hoard are as modest as the urge is compelling, the Nelsons’ solution to the problem is a sound one, I think. Nabonidus, whose extravagance in his hoarding—among other bad habits—ultimately cost him his kingdom, could have taken a lesson.
—Barbara Wallraff