All the right buttons

They don’t take up much space, so you can collect lots of them – and indeed you should, because it’s only in their diversity that they show us something. If you do collect them, you can call yourself an orbiculologist, as one professor of material history would have it, because orbiculus means ‘button’ in Latin and anything in Latin sounds smart. The abundance of button designs and shapes, as well as the materials they are made from, means that almost everybody has an old biscuit tin full of them, but few will look at them with the fondness of a collector – as Andrzej Banach deplored in his excellent booklets from the 1960s[1]. Later, when collecting ordinary items became more popular in Poland, the topic of buttons was still rarely broached in specialist periodicals, and if it was, then the focus was usually on military or heraldic ones. Those are certainly much easier to master. Each one means something, each is simultaneously its own reference point, and the timeframe is clear: they only appeared in the mid-17^th century along with the introduction of military uniforms and more elaborate courtly etiquette. Ushered in by collectors of militaria, buttons joined the collectors’ club as part of the collecting craze that began to flourish in Poland in the 1970s. They even earned their own column in the magazine supplement Kolekcjoner Polski (The Polish Collector) – always trailing behind philately, numismatics, phillumeny and other more conventional pursuits.

But other factors can guide our choices if we finally free ourselves of the curse of typology. ‘A chance encounter with a dozen of these items will be enough to demonstrate which is important and which isn’t,’ advised Banach, and I believe him.

Let me be guided by the material, shape, general niceness – nobody can prohibit that. Let me be guided by chance encounters, here and now, at the market stall, the little shop, the rubbish tip. One might start with a single button, but a thousand right away is better. This collection made itself, because it would have been silly not to pick up those boxes that had just been laid out on the blanket at 7 a.m that morning. ‘How on earth have they survived like this?’ I asked. Just as I was captivated by things as a child, I was again kneeling down in amazement, wondering if I was, in fact, dreaming. There was nothing unusual in this story. Post-German history again, but this time in Silesia: somebody had climbed into the attic of a dilapidated cottage and found the stock of a pre-war haberdashery. I took everything on that blanket. And ‘everything’ meant long boxes that stank of mould and were full of buttons stitched onto decorative pieces of cardboard. All of them were glass, and each card had a different design. Like sweets: blue, green and white hearts, round ones with a relief pattern, painted flowers, ones in the shape of forget-me-nots, cornflowers and daisies, as well as Tyrolean hats, small, black rhombuses as if meant for a cassock or burial clothes, black and white balls, big blue ones with abstract patterns, more hearts but this time with flowers, in sets of contrasting or single colours – the curse of abundance. The pieces of cardboard had decoratively cut edges and their gilded letters cried out: ‘Neuheit! Latest style! Washable!’ Stooped over them, I glanced at the buttons on my clothes: ordinary, dull plastic. What a disgrace! Now I have enough buttons for all the cardigans I’ll wear for the rest of my life and then some. But somehow I don’t dare unpack the collection, the whole is sacred.

Translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones

[1] Andrzej Banach (1910–1990) was an art historian, philosopher and collector, who was one of the first Polish intellectuals to write about the beauty of everyday objects and more marginal artistic phenomena such as kitsch, fashion or collecting.