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“King’s book is absolutely fascinating. At first I was wary. Was this going to be only a gnarled wry exegesis of a nutty preoccupation? But, rather quickly, he made the collecting an avenue into himself, his life, his world. It finishes as a unique autobiography, in a way quite endearing. And like all the best autobiographies, it is in some measure about the reader himself. The writing is very taking, almost as if it were fashioned by a fine craftsman yet with no sense of effort. Witty, especially perceptive, candid yet with an attractive humility.”
Stanley Kauffmann

“A wonderful work of creative nonfiction, a memoir combined with a brilliant dissection of the psychological and consumerist motivations and contexts for collecting (and collecting and collecting) everyday objects. Compellingly self-aware and beautifully written, it marries a well-told analysis of personal, eccentric behavior and an intricate interweave of larger theories about the drive to accumulate and possess. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Rosellen Brown

Collections of Nothing

William Davies King

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he’s odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that’s just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it’s a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King’s unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King’s life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

William Davies King has explored numerous odd corners of theater history in books and articles, including Henry Irving’s “Waterloo,ö which won the Joe A. Calloway Prize. He is professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

William Davies King is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Levi Stahl at (773) 702-0289 or lstahl@press.uchicago.edu