By Eddie Lo
William Davies King is a collector. He collects things of no commercial value. The UC Santa Barbara professor has collected more than 25,000 food product labels, 10,000 business cards, 2,300 cereal boxes, 1,400 bottle caps, 800 envelope linings, and other everyday items.
“I collect nothing — with a passion. That is to say, I collect hardly anything that is collectible, not a thing anyone else would wish to collect,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir “Collections of Nothing.”
Over four decades, William Davies King has amassed more than 2,300 cereal boxes. Photo by Matt Perko.
King, who teaches in UCSB’s Theater and Dance department, began collecting when he was a child. He said that he collected how every other kid collects, whether it was baseball cards or Pokemon cards, but he simply put more energy into it and stuck with it. Eventually, he focused on turning collecting into an art form.
A portion of King’s collection has been curated into an exhibition, located at UCSB Library’s Mountain Gallery. Opened in March, the exhibition, “The Creative Edge of Collecting: The ‘Nothing’ of William Davies King,” showcases the artistic aspect of collecting.
Because the library is currently closed due to COVID-19, a virtual tour recorded and narrated by King is available for the public to view online.
Thousands of items like bottle caps, stickers, cards, water labels, are laid out in display cases and on the wall of the gallery. Many of these ordinary objects, when put together in great numbers, resemble qualities of Pop art.
For example, King’s collection of bottle caps, each printed with different labels and brand names, are laid out in a continuous stream to resemble a river. And King’s “Kitchen Collection” depicts masses of stickers of different colors and prints. The stickers are collected on sheets of paper, and they span three panels on the wall of the gallery.
Apart from those collections, which King refers to as “more or less just accumulations of things,” the exhibition also features works he created with the purpose of art-making.
One display case holds collages filled with photographs, illustrations, and paintings. King created one titled “Big Farmer Big Jesus” from the children’s book “Big Farmer,” in which he has repurposed content from classical images of renaissance biblical art. Another collage, titled “The Faith of the Soviet Image,” is made from a book of Norman Rockwell's magazine illustrations, “Faith of America,” intercut with symbols and figures of the Soviet Union.
William Davies King’s vast sticker collection, which includes stickers he peels off of street signs and lampposts, featured in the UCSB library exhibition “The Creative Edge of Collecting.”
Librarian Alex Regan, who was responsible for managing King’s exhibition, was struck by the beauty of these ordinary objects. “Even something as simple as labels that you put on fruits to identify them, once you put a lot of them together, they make quite a statement,” she said.
King says he doesn’t have a favorite category to collect, and that resulted in the diversity and uniqueness of his various collections.
Among the many collections, one that stands out is his trove of “scam emails” — he has three binders full of printed scam emails that he had received over the years in his inbox. “They’re the kind of Nigerian scam emails where they try to lure you into helping them get $5 billion dollars out of the country,” he explained. “I started collecting those when I started to see them.”
Many collections also became part of his identity. Everyday objects he acquired and made into a collection essentially came from the way he lived his life, he said.
“[The collections] are almost like a diary in a certain way, a diary that is purely in the form of this ephemera,” said King. “In a way, [they] represent me because you can see the name of my wife. You can see the name of my daughter. You can see references to things that actually I lived through.”
The exhibition “The Creative Edge of Collecting“ will be available for visits when the library re-opens. An accompanying stage reading and a talk on collecting and hoarding by King and professor Rebecca Falkoff from New York University are both scheduled to happen on Zoom on Nov. 5.
Eddie Lo is a second-year psychological & brain sciences major at UC Santa Barbara. He wrote this article for his Writing Program course, Journalism for Web and Social Media.