“Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death” - Wendy Wasserstein

As I read the Wall Street Journal article I realized that here was yet another nerdy hobby that I could associate myself with...shopping bag collecting. In a way, it's a relief...it's always good to know that there are others like you (though I won't be joining the flickr group).

I can honestly say that I have hoarded "the paper"...or, for that matter, "the plastic"...since I was a teenager. I remember storing my bags by hanging them on a hat stand...overlapping so that nothing could be seen of the stand, or most of the underlying bags. It was a dust-trap...it was, most certainly, a fire hazard...and it looked disturbingly like the bogey-man if you woke up in the middle of the night and happened to look that way...but it was also, in its own way, a way of holding onto memories...

A Joseph bag with one of Pamela Hanson's seductive yet strong women moodily staring out from its one dimensional depths would recall a trip to London (and probably the purchase of an over-sized sweater)...Katherine Hamnett's austere yet comforting brown paper bags (another trip to London, another memory...walking across the glass bridge in her Norman Foster designed Brompton Road store to reach the austere wasteland behind). Thanks to various moves these bags only exist for me now in memory...and thanks to Mr. Heb and his love of "de-cluttering" a similar collection will not begin again...though there are a few bags sneakily stored in a drawer somewhere...