Why Doesn’t Iceland Have a Museum of Napkins?
An investigation.
It’s already there in the language: the way safn
is both a collection and a museum, and part of the Icelandic word for
library, and a term one might use to describe a group of sheep. It’s
there, too, in how sets of things in the parlor have a way of moving
outside the home—to sloping mountainside yards, to lakeside sheds, to
downtown storefronts. It’s the Icelandic predilection for museums, for
turning private collections into public displays—evident in places such
as Petra’s Stone Collection, Sigurgeir’s Bird Museum, the Icelandic Phallological Museum,
and the toy museums in Akureyri, Borgarnes, and Grudafjörđur, or the
transportation collections, which can be found in the north and west and
south. Iceland is a land of museums. It has a genius for them, in all
sorts and forms.
As I researched my book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See,
I sat down with many collectors, curators, and directors to ask about
the origins of their museums. I heard the same progression so often that
I came to recognize its stages. Someone, almost accidentally, has a
collection. The neighbors drop by to see. Then a community group makes
an appointment. The newspaper writes something up, maybe the television
news, too. And then more people come. Strangers. Tourists. Until you
have to do something with all that interest, all those people dropping
by. Indeed, the pattern happened often enough—private collections
becoming public by degrees—that I began to think that the next one could
be predicted.
So I started asking every Icelander I
met: Where is there a collection big enough, known enough, visited
enough, that it is in one of those stages, maybe getting close, about to
tip into being a museum of its own?
To count museums in Iceland, to collect
them in a way, is astonishingly complicated. There is a minimum of 45
officially accredited institutions, but the annual Iceland Museum Guide
lists 173. Understood broadly enough to include not just the museums,
but also what might come into English as public collections,
exhibitions, galleries, or centers, the running tally from University of
Iceland museum studies professor Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson is more
like 300. Nowhere in the world do private collections become public
museums with such ease. It is a phenomenon all the more stunning for
having happened, almost entirely, in the last 25 years.
The Icelandic town of Flateyri has
a population of 201 people and five museums. Six if you count the one
on the outskirts. Seven if you count its first museum, founded in 1992,
now buried with a third of town by an avalanche in 1995. It is wildly
disproportionate, even in a country that has nearly one museum per
thousand people. Flateyri, on a northwest fjord just a couple hundred
miles from Greenland, has a museum for every 40 residents.
The museums of Flateyri include a tribute
to dolls of the world in the middle of a restaurant, a fleet of model
ships in a garage, historical displays in a well-worn shed, and a 1915
general store and living quarters (not lived in anymore, but still
selling used books, by the kilogram, weighed out on a blue vintage
balance). And there is also, in a sprawling second-floor space
overlooking the street, the Nonsense Museum.
I had been watching and
studying this particularly Icelandic hyper-evolution, the way
collections suddenly become museums, when I first came across the
listing for the Nonsense Museum in a 2015 Museum Guide. It felt like a
thing preordained, like finding the species to fill a gap in the fossil
record. It felt like a thing you could have predicted: a museum about
collecting itself, a museum about an idea, about its own patent
absurdity.
Yet
the Nonsense Museum, while spectacularly named, is more random than
absurd. It offers whole rooms devoted to the collections of local
residents: pens, toy planes, wine bottle labels, tobacco packaging,
matchboxes, teaspoons, sugar cubes, playing cards, Pez dispensers, salt
and pepper shakers, lighters in novelty shapes, police uniforms on
faceless dummies, monkey tchotchkes. Seen together they comprise a
museum that is almost fractal: Within this island that collects so many
museums, there is a town of so many museums, including a museum of so
many collections, collections of so many things.
And in the shadow of all this, I was
still asking for the moment before, still looking for a collection on
the brink of becoming a museum.
There were surprisingly few
leads. Almost nothing. Then in Heimaey, an island off an island, after a
few calls, I was taking off my shoes to walk into a private home. In
the living room: drawers and drawers of paper napkins. On the loveseat
and the sofa, piles of binders overflowing with yet more napkins. The
collection began in 1955. Napkins with dates printed on them went back
at least to 1962. A confirmation in 1979. The end of school in 1993. A
wedding in 2001. Among the napkins were a scallop-edged floral from when
the collector was five years old, another in a duck pattern that
matched her sister-in-law’s tablecloth years ago, others from Lykil
Hotel or Pizza Hut or the Military Air Transport Service of the U.S. Air
Force. Flowers and fruits and angels and farms and Disney characters
and Santa Claus: maybe 14,000 of them in all.
Eygló Ingólfsdottir collects napkins
“because when I was growing up there was nothing to do.” No television.
No phone. But there were so many girls with the same idea back then, she
says, six or seven might show up in a snowstorm after Christmas or
Easter to ask if you had any napkins. They collected them in duplicate
to have some to trade with their friends. This collection survived the
volcanic eruption that evacuated the island when Ingólfsdottir was 24
and kept her family away for three years. The collecting peaked in her
mid-30s. Everywhere she went, she asked, “Do you have some napkins?” For
a while in her 40s she focused on napkins printed with good landscapes
to serve as references for painting. Over the last 10 or 15 years, more
come in from friends than she collects herself. She’s swapped a few
napkins with collectors she’s met online—one in Germany and two from
Norway. With her mother about to turn 100, she says maybe they’ll print
some napkins for that.
I had never seen a napkin collection. Now
that I know to look for them, know the thing to ask, I’ve found a few
more tucked away in private homes. In this place that excels at the
narrow niche museum, or else the kind of local history museum that
Icelanders call the “same things from 50 different farms,” the napkin
collections still seem a kind of secret.
This is the case even
though a generation of children made a point to collect them from every
local wedding and baptism, received napkins as souvenirs from family who
brought back airline cocktail napkins or paper goods from abroad. There
are middle-aged and older women, throughout the island, who still have
thousands, sorted into bags and boxes by theme or era, but never enough
time to count them all—and no one is thinking there’s a museum just
waiting to spring from this personal history, this alternative primer on
mass production and graphic design, this artifact of a nation opening
up to the world and finally having enough money for disposable things.
Perhaps the napkins have yet to see
public display because they’ve been overlooked, lost in the shuffle. Too
trivial, too ubiquitous, though that hasn’t prevented collections of
toys or birds or rocks or automobiles from becoming museums. Maybe we’re
a hair too soon in the process—precocious—and we need to lose more of
these collections before Icelanders see fit to save any. Maybe the issue
is that we still think this is about napkins and not about the stories
they tell. There is a way in which it still seems inevitable to me,
though. One of these napkin collections will take.
Ingólfsdottir’s friends
still come over to see the napkins. She’s even thought of sending some
to a museum, though it would break her heart to give the collection away
or break it up. What she likes best is when women her age look through
the collection in the living room and it brings back good memories. But
then, she says, “It’s a small house. I may have to stop.”