A Museum of Small Things

The museum has no name on the door. Inside, a collection of corkscrews, pencil sharpeners, rubber bands, and paperclips is arranged with the seriousness usually reserved for sculpture.

How it began

The curator - a retired industrial designer named Dirk Maes, though he winces at the title curator - bought his first exhibit at a flea market in Brussels in 1987. It was a Swingline 747 stapler from 1952, in the original red.

“I paid two francs for it,” he says. “I wanted to understand why it felt right in the hand when most staplers do not. I thought if I took it apart I would find out.”

He did not take it apart. He put it on a shelf and looked at it for several months. Then he bought another stapler, a cheaper one from the same era, and put it beside the first. The comparison was instructive. The answer was the same: someone cared.

The collection

The museum now holds approximately 3,400 objects, distributed across what was once a three-bay garage behind Maes’s house. The bays have been whitewashed and fitted with open shelving made from scaffold boards. There is no glass between the visitor and the objects.

The categories resist easy summary. There are writing instruments: pencils, fountain pens, mechanical pencils, and approximately 200 pencil sharpeners, including several that Maes considers among the finest small objects ever designed. There are fasteners: the rubber band collection alone occupies an entire wall. There are kitchen tools, measuring instruments, and a section Maes calls “unclassifiable” that contains objects whose function has in some cases become unclear.

The quality without a name

Christopher Alexander wrote about “the quality without a name” - the property that makes some buildings and some places feel genuinely alive while others feel inert. Maes has not read Alexander, but he arrives at a similar idea from a different direction.

“There are objects that function and objects that function and do something else,” he says. “The something else is very hard to define. It is not beauty exactly, though it is usually present in beautiful things. It is more like - the object has considered the hand that will hold it.”

The 1952 Swingline considered the hand. The cheaper stapler did not. The difference is not price. Maes has objects that cost almost nothing that have the quality, and expensive objects that do not.

No entrance fee, no labels

There is no entrance fee. There are no object labels. Visitors are asked only to handle the objects carefully and to leave their favourite in the comments book, a physical notebook that has been running for eleven years and now fills twelve volumes.

The comments book is itself a kind of collection - a record of what people notice and why. Maes reads it regularly. He has on occasion acquired objects because visitors mentioned them in the book. The museum is in this sense collaborative, shaped by the attention of everyone who has visited.

What the small things say

Mass-produced objects are invisible in a way that artworks are not. We use them and discard them and replace them without attending to what they are. The museum makes this invisibility visible. Placed on a white shelf in a room of other objects that have been considered worthy of attention, a paperclip becomes strange.

It is, when you look at it, an elegant solution to a genuine problem. The loop form distributes the clamping force. The double bend allows easy insertion and removal. The gauge of wire is a compromise between spring tension and flexibility. Someone worked this out. Someone decided on these proportions. The paperclip is not a found object. It is a designed one.

This is what the museum argues, without argument, by simply placing things in front of you and stepping back. The small things were made by someone who cared. That is not a small thing.