Dear Lee and Fellow Collectors,

Prepare to defend yourself from comments by psychologists who, while searching for new diseases, have decided that compulsive buying (aka collecting), is a mental problem. How silly! We all know that those of us who yearn for a sunny weekend so we can prowl flea markets and b-u-y are perfectly normal. We understand that collecting is fun, healthy, and sometimes income-producing. So what do these psychologists say? Their studies show that one in 20 people can’t control the urge to shop. This “problem” is not considered an obsessive-compulsive disorder nor a true compulsion, but an “impulse control disorder.” Studies even show that income is not a factor. Some on welfare can be compulsive buyers or, at least, savers. And these compulsive buyers, according to the studies, know they have a problem.

Nonsense. Collectors are historians, archivists, decorators. Collecting is not done, as these studies suggest, out of loneliness, or to fill an inner need, or to escape depression. Psychiatrists know that drugs like Prozac don’t seem to help “cure” collecting. We know thousands of collectors, and only a few have had problems. One divorced a non-collecting spouse who resented the amount of money spent on Satsuma instead of new clothes. A few have had critical money problems, and some have even gone to jail for embezzling money to buy a rarity. But this is unusual.

On the positive side, New York magazine featured passionate collectors last month. Paperback romance novels, bottle stoppers shaped like heads of well-known people, Naughty Nelly bootjacks, transportation toys, Italian glass, black memorabilia, and costume jewelry are a few of the collections the article praised. True collectors see “beauty and interest in objects others overlook,” the article said.

The sun is out. Let’s go shopping.