ABSTRACT
Marketing to collectors via the Internet is, in some ways, an update of colour supplement advertising. It is perhaps fitting that the poetics of collecting, which seeks to entice through the lure of hyperreality, finds a ready expression and audience on the Internet, the very apex of the virtual. In our example here, the Corgi Heritage Centre perhaps illustrates the tension between museumness and popular collecting. Not a museum in professional terms, but far more than a shop, it calls itself a 'heritage centre' , but containing a 'museum'. Much of the marketing on the Internet revolves around virtual 'sites'. Demon Records, for instance, a mailorder record service, has a virtual record shop website. As such, mail order and other similar services can appropriate the terminology and the imagery of place and fixity. In conjunction with shops, such websites project an ambience and environment very close to that of the museum. One major difference, however, is that sales outlets encourage passivity and museums encourage active engagement in some way.
