Collecting Strategies

Collier’s McLaren

How is it that of two collectors with equal resources and dedication, one becomes a major figure and the other does not? For any given level of resources (income, time, and contacts), a collector is capable of rising to the level that his senses and understanding permit. Sensibility and expertise make the difference between connoisseurship and mere accumulation. The uncanny ability to distinguish the very good from the good, the fine from the ordinary, is a trait of all great collectors.

Beyond even sensibility and taste, good collecting requires establishing criteria that focus the collection and give it intelligible structure. Simultaneously, the collection must be about passion, with a true love for—and understanding of—the object. Similar to much successful creativity elsewhere, the formal, syntactical structure of the collection needs to be counterbalanced by the sheer emotionality of the collector’s passion. It is the emotion of the collector that causes him to incorporate the idiosyncratic cars that no expert would dare suggest. It is this willingness to consciously break the formal criteria that gives the collection its savor. Intelligence coupled with emotion is the necessary ingredient required to create a collection that evokes understanding, appreciation, and delight in others. If we are to aspire to significant collections, we must harness our “animal spirits” with understanding and sensibility for the object, and we must have knowledge of basic collecting strategies.

Almost all collections are built with a mixture of strategies, and provided the mix is used consciously, the results can be gratifying. Let us now review the characteristics and properties of six common approaches to collecting.

Nostalgic Collecting Strategy

One common strategy almost universally present in collections is the nostalgic/opportunistic strategy. Despite the title, it is essentially a non-strategy. The nostalgic collecting approach of pure emotionality probably represents the normal starting point for most collectors. It is an “extensive” strategy, being unbounded by any constraint, and usually is without focus. As one collector said, “You kind of just buy.”

The nostalgic/opportunist strategy is founded in the hobbyist point of view and takes its direction from areas of deep subjectivity, summed up by the phrase: “I don’t know much about cars, but I know what I like.” Such collections, while scratching an emotional itch, tend to be excessively repetitive, unfocused, or of very uneven quality. They tend to develop into a hodgepodge of objects that, upon the subsequent development of the collector’s taste and experience, require substantial if not total revision. The ultimate size and quality of collections built this way is based on happenstance and the product of the collector’s initial obsession. Such collections, being directionless, are limited only by the collector’s ambition, appetite, and the capacity to support his activity.

The collector’s first great step forward in collecting is the incorporation of cars not directly related to his personal experience. The result of that developmental step is commonly a conversion to a vertical strategy.

Vertical Collecting Strategy

One element of automobile collecting we often take for granted is the extreme complexity of the subject matter, the very complexity that makes the collectible car such a rich and satisfying object. Unfortunately, this complexity also means that the nascent collector must master a great deal of information relating to automotive technology, maintenance, history, original model configuration, subtle variations in specification, etc. that strongly affect value.

As often as not, as the collector’s experience grows, the nostalgic/opportunistic strategy, given time to mature, develops a theme either as a primary focus or as a secondary or subsidiary focus by turning from an extensive to an intensive (focused and bounded) strategy. The most logical and simple vertical theme involves a concentration on one marque. Such an approach cuts through time along the production continuum of one maker. Organizing the collection about the chronological sequence of models, vertical strategies are often concerned with “completeness” and the filling out of sets.

Advantages:

• • Reduces the collectible universe to a manageable size.
• • The collector can master one marque in great detail relatively easily.
• • Allows a focus on individual quality, the thing that distinguishes one example of a make/model from another.
• • Good strategy for someone who wants to collect definitive examples, therefore good for sharpening the eye and developing connoisseurship skills.
• • Easier to know “where the bodies are buried,” to get deal flow, and be able to rate the quality of that flow.
• • Easier to master the maintenance and restoration technology and sources for research material.

• • The market for other makes can move away in terms of real dollars, creating a lost opportunity never to be recaptured.
• • The marque’s collecting scope may be limited with few models and a short history.
• • Collection can become self-limiting or hermetic, and the collector parochial in his views.
• • After years of collecting, the collector may find his real interest lies elsewhere.

Horizontal Collecting Strategy

Another collecting alternative that can be extensive or intensive in scope is an approach based on collecting within a horizontal slice of time. By limiting the area requiring mastery to a band of time, the collector once more can focus his research to a manageable body of knowledge. For example, he might choose to collect American convertibles of the late 1950s. In so doing, he creates collecting criteria that cut across a series of marques, but is restricted by upper and lower temporal boundaries as well as specific car types.

Advantages

The horizontal strategy enjoys many of the same advantages as the vertical strategy. In addition, however, it opens collectors to:

• • Seeing market value changes across a broader spectrum of cars. Seeing the bigger picture reduces the danger of being left out in the cold by rapid market shifts.
• • Serendipity. The collector may find he is more interested in cars of type “x” than type “y.”

Disadvantages:

Horizontal strategies make it more difficult to connect to sources, as typically more than one make of automobile is involved. As cars are normally studied, supported, and even sourced by marque, the research, acquisition, and conservation challenges increase. Consequently, to move from Ferrari to Aston Martin is a harder task than shifting from Ferrari road cars to Ferrari Grand Prix cars.

Implied Horizontal Strategy:

As a collection grows and encompasses more than one make, multiple vertical themes may emerge. The accretion of multiple vertical themes can begin to place a number of cars within the same time period. At some point, sufficient contemporaneous cars exist to make the further pursuit of one or more horizontal strategies a practical reality.

Understanding one marque makes cross-correlating to another make via their common world automotive history much easier. This process is analogous to learning a new language. The more languages you already speak, the easier it is to learn the next due to commonalities. A cross-correlating horizontal strategy may have less validity when two marques are wholly unrelated, i.e. Lotus and Duesenberg, as distinct from Duesenberg and Isotta-Fraschini, or more naturally yet, Duesenberg and Packard.

Thematic Collecting Strategy

Thematic approaches, being intensive in nature, are related to vertical strategies, but have a more random pattern to the connections. Thematic collections are not confined to one make or even a few makes or time slices. Consider the high performance sports car as a theme. Such a collection might start at the turn of the century and terminate with, say, the McLaren F1.

Execution of such a theme becomes a function of judgment and taste, open to debate, argument and differences of opinion. For example, is the 540K Mercedes a required element on the continuum of high performance sports cars? Comparing experts’ thoughts on the proper constituents of this sports car-themed collection would be instructive, especially if the judgments came from driving experience in addition to research.

Indeed, the Collier Museum, in Naples, FL, exhibits such a theme in the sports cars of Briggs Cunningham. It is one of our four themed collections in the museum. Obviously the particular selection of cars is open to personal idiosyncrasies (the emotional/expressive element referred to earlier). For example, not all would agree with the selection of the Lotus Elite as a worthy addition to the sports car collection. In this type of collecting, the issue turns on finding the “right” object, as identified by the particular collector through thorough research. In the history of the sports car example, the identity of the individual automobile, allowing for condition, would be less critical to the quality of the collection than the absolutely right make and model. By contrast, the individual car is critical to a racing-based theme, where the history of each individual car chosen becomes significant (e.g. Jorgensen Eagle Indy car).

With the thematic strategy, the requirement for broader expertise becomes more important. This collecting approach requires a large investment in research and analysis. Fortunately, such research elements are logically connected by development of the theme in question. A thematic strategy will push every collector into unknown areas outside his comfort zone, where his intellect must serve as a guide to his emotion. The focus of such a strategy lies in finding the appropriate make, model, and example to do justice to the theme. If the car in question is very rare, such a requirement makes the search an exercise in patience and focus, to say nothing of pocketbook capacity. Consider for example, a collection based on the history of the Grand Prix car, which sooner or later would require an example of a pre-war Mercedes or Auto-Union.

Relational Collecting Strategy

At first this strategy looks like the nostalgic/opportunistic strategy. Similar to that strategy, it is extensive, being neither bounded nor otherwise thematically constrained. However, the relationship between objects is no longer inchoate, arising out of the collector’s psychic stew, but explicit and carefully conceived.

Consider the Ford Model T–Rolls-Royce dyad.

What car might we add to create a triad? Let’s consider the McLaren F1:

• • One-model strategy
• • About 100 built (class/quality)
• • Artisanal but cutting edge technology
• • Non-integrated manufacturing
• • Industry standard/paradigm
• • U.K.-built for a world market
• • Not obsolete—production stopped due to declining demand

The connectivity among these cars could be through history, technology, significance, and so on. The linkages may not be obvious to the casual observer unless explained, but the key is that the linkages are made through similarities and not differences. In the Ford–Rolls example above, the Model T becomes a “surprise” object, hardly the thing that would be suggested by a slew of experts for a “Calendar Collection” of great classic automobiles. The relational approach represents a highly intellectualized step in collecting. In relational collecting, to a great extent, the intellect controls the direction in which the collector’s emotions run.

The process of connecting emotionally appealing cars is akin to creating a crossword puzzle. The appropriate car linking several others must be found by inference and through relationships to other cars in the collection. It should be apparent that the successful implementation of relational collecting requires an almost encyclopedic knowledge of automotive history and collectible cars.

Because of the cross connections in relational collecting, the problem of filling out a series, or completing a theme, never applies. Right from the beginning, the collection is always “complete.” A collection carefully constructed in this way, incorporating both the collector’s love of the objects and his consummate research to create a web of connections, would be intensely exciting for connoisseur and casual enthusiast alike.

Before we conclude, we should consider one important dichotomy among car collectors. This particular trait, whether the collector is contemplative or experiential in his collecting nature, determines many characteristics of his collection.

The experiential collector’s primary interaction with his collection is through his kinesthetic senses. He drives his cars, and indeed, has little use or regard for cars he cannot use. This is not to say that he doesn’t appreciate his car’s technology, beauty, and historic importance; indeed he does. But to this collector, use is paramount.

The contemplative collector, by contrast, interacts with his collection through his intellect. As such, while this collector may enjoy driving his cars, operation is not the key requirement to his collecting. Indeed, some of his cars may not even run. This great and fundamental divide has important implications.

The need to drive every car limits the size of the experiential collection. In addition, the variety of cars, their condition, and practicality all need to be limited if the operating constraint is to be fulfilled. For example, highly fragile or delicate cars, whether due to condition or design, are inappropriate and not usually collected. More prone to seeing his collection, not only as a repository of historic objects, but also as an assemblage of sporting or competition equipment, the experiential collector’s maintenance and service costs will tend to be much higher per vehicle than the contemplative collector’s.

Where a user’s collection is limited in size, a contemplative collection is unbounded by practical considerations, and often features “museum type” or other impractical vehicles. Contemplative collectors are much more focused on filling out sets, or collecting according to some idea. In fact, contemplative collectors are probably closer in their sensibilities to collectors in other antiquarian fields.

Conclusion

Human nature being what it is, the strategies discussed above probably have a greater chance of guiding a collection after it has been begun. A strategic collecting plan represents a way to bring structure, editing, and refinement to a group of objects perhaps assembled with a lack of sufficient temperance, but an admirable amount of zeal. The sooner we as collectors can bring focus to our collections, the more we can increase our engagement with these objects in an appropriate way, and the better we can become at preserving our automotive heritage.