A forager’s tale

One day in the 1980s, Alan Cole, who was then working for a bank, received a phone call from a friend, Philip. “Meet me at the British Museum and bring some carrier bags,” Philip told him. “I duly met him in the forecourt of the museum where there were skips with a train of people filling them with boxes,” says Cole, now 87. “Philip spoke to the man in charge, who shrugged his shoulders. Then Philip and I started to fill our bags with pens, pencils, nib-boxes, plus some 18th and 19th-century school exercise books. I can only guess that they were unwanted items [belonging to] the British Library, which was preparing to move to King’s Cross [from the site it shared with the museum].”

These “spoils” were not the first objects relating to writing to enter Cole’s collection. Ever since he was a teenager he has collected artefacts pertaining to writing in the loosest of terms, from ancient Mesopotamian payroll registers to a 19th-century Shamanic wind chime-styled calendar from Indonesia.

It all started when Cole was 15, about to leave school, and a teacher told him: “It doesn’t matter how clever you are if nobody can read your writing.” He then spent hours in the British Library looking at letters from notable scientists and artists.

“They wrote no more legibly than I did, but the spark had been struck and I started to collect anything to do with writing.”

In the following decades he acquired more than 100,000 objects that cover more than 5,000 years of writing history, from around 3000BC to 2010. Now a number of them are on display in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Writing, located in Senate House library in Bloomsbury, London.

“It’s a rare opportunity, in today’s age, to be there at the start of a museum opening,” says Jade Cuttle, The Observer’s poetry critic and the collection’s curator. Cole sold his collection to the University of London in 2010, and it has since been sitting in storage.

“I was excited by the opportunity to unleash [the objects] from their cage,” says Cuttle, who has undertaken some of the cataloguing of the items, although there is much still to do. Her aim with the exhibition is “to show the public that writing is not just the boring, 2D, black-and-white format that we are so familiar with, whether it’s ink on a page or pixels on a screen – our dominant modes of communication.”

The exhibition includes a quipu, an ancient Andean device used as far back as 2600BC. The collection’s version is an 18th-century example, on which the “writer” would tie knots along brightly coloured strands of wool to record numbers such as the fields owned by one person, or the amount of grain sold. Before coming across the quipu, Cuttle “had never encountered the idea that knots could carry meaning in that way”, she says. “I know they can be a nuisance in daily life – whether that’s a knot in a Hoover cable or in my very curly hair. But here, knots can be beautiful”.

Cole had the opportunity to collect more objects when he joined the Royal Air Force and was stationed on Kiritimati, an island in the Pacific. On his way back, he picked up more unusual artefacts with Indonesian and Tibetan origins. “The collection grew rapidly, as did my obsession,” he recalls.

On his return to London, he made contact with dealers, everyone from antiquities experts to sellers at church fairs. He acquired more items on further travels – he bought the quipu in Costa Rica. Other objects came from “the time I had a third share in the then only antiquarian bookshop in the City,” Cole says, “when I had the choice of the many items that came in lieu of a wage”.

Most of Cole’s writing-related items are no longer in his possession, but he hasn’t given it all up. “I still have my own collections,” he says, suggesting there might be even more for Cuttle and her museum colleagues to explore. The story is not written yet.

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Illustration by Oscar Ingham