Harley Spiller, a collector, talks about living in a small New York City apartment with his collection of “ordinary things people don’t think twice about”—including the largest private collection of menus in the world.
Originally aired January 25, 2008, on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Harley Spiller (HS)
HS: I have probably close to a million objects in my 28 by 10 foot apartment. …Pencils, bottle caps, key rings, ten-thousand Chinese menus going back to the 1890’s… I have only two chairs in the house, one in each room, a few benches with storage in them. The Chinese menus are under my queen-sized bed. …about 60 different white, plastic spoons… I collect everyday ordinary things people don’t think twice about. String. It sounds ridiculous. A collection of string, you must be nuts. But without it we’d all be naked. …a couple hundred funky neckties… I have the collection of things that sound like my name, Harley Spiller. I have an autograph to me from Phyllis Diller, signed with love. I spent 42 minutes doing my dog-gonnest to trade a second grader for his baseball card for a first baseman named Harry Spillman. …about 400 different packs of chewing gum… My father’s father was in the merchandise redistribution business. That’s a junk dealer. I’m named for him. He would go around with his horse and buggy and go, ”Rags bought, rags sold!” If someone had a musty, old couch he would pick that up and take it home. He was never gonna sit in it. As soon as he got it home, he would pull the cushions off, slit the back with a knife and find coins, eyeglasses, scissors, all kind of cool things. …and I collect flags from around the world, paper money… I don’t collect stamps. There’s too many. They’re never-ending. Every year every country makes hundreds of different stamps and there’s just too many to be complete. —pictures of corn and hamburgers and hotdogs and crabs… I know it’s unusual, but I think I’ve got it under control. I think I’m right on the border between obsessed and intelligent about these things. I don’t really care about this stuff, that’s the bottom line. I don’t really care about my menus. If they were to disappear tomorrow, I still know everything I know about them and that’s what matters. …pineapple chicken $7.85, butterfly shrimp $8.75, sesame chicken or beef $7.95, shrimp with spiced pepper and salt $9.15, triple shredded 8 and a quarter…
When Deborah Wei and her family moved to the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1960’s, they were the only Asian family in their neighborhood. Deborah remembers how her mother made their new surroundings feel like home.
