Peter Palumbo
A true collector was once defined as someone who pays no regard to estimated prices, investment value, or the predeter- mined location on his or her walls or floor of a particular work of art. If these are correct criteria, I suppose that I must plead guilty on all three counts. Collectors as a breed tend sometimes to be unpredict- able, even eccentric. They set out in search of a certain objective: they return, in triumph, with quite another. In 1943, at the age of eight, I was given ten shillings by my mother and told to bicycle to the local village to buy — of all things — a pair of braces. I returned home an hour later, minus the braces, but with a six-week-old mongrel puppy perched in the wicker basket slung between the handlebars. I.had purchased him for the ten shillings, which represented my entire worldly assets, from a roadside tramp, who imposed one condi- tion on the transaction as a face-saver for failing to achieve his asking price of 30 shillings. 'Promise me,' he said gravely, `that you will call him Joe after Uncle Joe Stalin.' Such a promise was not undertaken lightly, but the Russians were, of course our allies at the time: and Joe he remained, a loyal, faithful and uncannily intelligent and caring friend for the next 17 years. Even now, I cannot quite understand why it was that I received a sound spanking for the acquisition of this beguiling purchase. How, after all, can an appendage whose sole function is to hold up the trousers be put in the same class as such a character- forming alternative?
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