ABSTRACT
For collectors, as age advances, so does contemplation of the collection's end. Christ's study ofretired stamp collectors (Christ, 1965) illustrated the shrewdness with which many of them feit they had acted in salting away rare stamps for resale in later life. These, it was feit, had more certainly of maintaining their value than any pension plan. As has been noted, contemporary collecting can also mean recognition of longer-term interests suddenly becoming fashionable. This has happened with souvenir spoon collecting. Many such collectors are middle-aged and elderly women, who combine in the Uni ted Kingdom Spoon Collectors' Club (UKSCC). The sampies cited in the texts come from fieldwork carried out by the author between 1994 and 1996. As this shows, some have been collecting for a considerable time (see Martin, 1999: 79-82, 84-6 for a fuller study). The semantics of objects and their vulnerability to fashionable trends mean we would be wrong to assurne that contemporary collecting is an activity engaged in only by the contemporary generation. Older collecting interests can suddenly find themselves propelled into the realm of the modem or even postmodern through the vagaries of 'taste'.
