Collector's Manual

With pleasure, I will submit myself to a handbook irrelevant to any task at hand–New To Gambling, Higher Consciousness, Witchcraft Today, Useful International Phrases... 

I have a friend: tall, aloof, handsome. His glasses connect at the center with a magnet. He uses his last name as his first. Several years ago when I went to borrow his blender, The Collector’s Handbook To Marks On Porcelain And Pottery was sitting on the counter, which I borrowed too. 240 pages, thousands of indisputable  marks organised by region: America, England, Spain, Portugal, Russia, China, Japan, Persia, most of continental Europe. Intended for the collector, the museum or librarian to help identify marks and guard against the abominable cleverness of the forger (given that the adoption of signs similar to those of the famous and valuable can be a source of endless confusion). In the introductory note–drier than earth scorched twice over–the nameless editors (lovers and/or compatriots) warn that this confusion can only be avoided by a knowledge of the wares themselves; not the marks. Upping the uselessness ante. Compiled with Especial pains taken. A compendium of mere symbols, benevolent expressions. Middle Ages to 1850. I have no tattoos but if I do get one it will be of a mark from this book. 

I have developed a habit of collecting copies and passing them off to friends or people with whom I do specific business. Published in 1974 with a jacket price of ten dollars, the book is hard and green. John Deere Green. Hess Green. Sprite Green. Carlsberg Green. It depends… My favourite copy looks like a forgotten lime, rolled to the back of a fridge drawer. My little blades of grass… A used copy used to cost me between four and fifteen dollars but I worry that my own habit has inflated the price, which now hovers at fifty.  I like to keep around five copies at a time. When one goes out, a bucket dips back into the drying eBay well ... In a pamphlet about collecting, W. Benjamin paraphrases Hegel: Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

I love repetition. I think because it bypasses reason until it becomes reason itself. The only thing that I really collect besides this book are rocks – my captives. On a trip to a new place, I will return to the same restaurant several times; usually the one that I discovered on the first day. Habit creates a feeling of belonging. It always surprises me how much this frustrates those around me, who believe this behavior forecloses experience. Meanwhile the sea spends all day and night washing the same shores… 

The inside of the book is like the back of the notepad of a middle schooler – one either practicing a signature or dreaming out the window, drawing while not looking. Small irregular shapes… Like the Monograms of Nicola Pellipario who came to Urbino in 1519 and worked in the bottega of his son Guido Fontana. Or the marks of Gubbio and Giorgio Andreoli known for their gold and carmine colors. (The secret of the chemical process which made the potter so famous, lost now partially rediscovered). 

The Collector’s Handbook To Marks On Porcelain And Pottery traffics in vaguenesses and therefore becomes a game of skimming– what stops you is based on simple and pure attraction. The notes supplied for each mark are negligible or non-existent. Little construction grounds for little stories that pass through the mind like a puff of wind. A given mark will invariably make you pause, for no good explanation, the way that you might when a person enters a room or a train car and you look up; their face takes you. 

There’s the signature of Hans Heinrich Graf, a Swiss stove builder and faience artist from Winterthur. There’s also a note about the extraordinary patience of the Huguenot potter Bernard Pallisy… I had never heard of Pallisy but later discovered that Marcel Proust mentions Palissy in the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past: "...and a fish cooked in a court-bouillon was brought in on a long earthenware platter, on which, standing out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, intact but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded by a ring of satellite shellfish, of animalcules, crabs, shrimps, and mussels, it had the appearance of a ceramic dish by Bernard Palissy."

When people look through this book they start to say things. As if the symbols are just prelaid track for an errant mind. My friend visiting from Lisbon came over the other day, as I was getting ready to leave for the airport. We overlapped for only one afternoon. She sat on my couch and turned the pages of The Collector’s Handbook while she talked to me and as I did things around my house—packed, emptied the fridge, looked for things. I love talking to someone when they’re about to leave; you can just be so free, she said as she walked out the door. Honesty emerges from the half-mast attention. We had both been telling each other things that somehow had never been spoken between us. She talked about an affair with our friend’s father who had been our high school teacher. She pointed out a mark - an annotation spiral. She then read out loud the brief introduction to Japanese Porcelain…  

A passage about a mark made by a man in 1515 whose success was short-lived. He left nothing behind but the knowledge of how to paint in blue underglaze. Images of the Hirado porcelains, Mikawachi ware, of which the best specimens were painted in a pale but pure blue of great delicacy. A favourite subject of these porcelains: boys playing under ancient pine, the number of boys – seven, five, or three – indicating the quality of the piece. 

Sometimes I try to get beyond the book, to learn more about the marks. But mostly they are dead ends. Birds plucked from a crowded sky. 

There’s an identifier for Veuve Perrin, the widow whose factory in Marseille, France, manufactured Faïence wares between 1748 and 1803. There are the 14th century marks from China that in just a few strokes contain great meaning: Elegant collection of holy friends, complete, exalted, national, precious trinket, veritable jade, made for the hall of triple harmony, made for the hall of profound peace.

My book of coordinates, my farmer’s almanac…my cursory,  liminal, shallow ponds or even just puddles … between two fragments almost anyone can be a poet ... Stoneware, earthenware, and unaware…

Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York. Her first novel, The Hearing Test, was published in 2024.