THE ATLANTIC WATCHING: Thanks to the Atlantic I am hipped to the existence of Andy Warhol's time capsules:

This serial work, spanning a thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, consists of 610 standard sized cardboard boxes, which Warhol, beginning in 1974, filled, sealed and sent to storage. Warhol used these boxes to manage the bewildering quantity of material that routinely passed through his life. Photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art-work, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages, along with objects and countless examples of ephemera, such as announcements for poetry readings and dinner invitations, were placed on an almost daily basis into a box kept conveniently next to his desk.

That statement from the Andy Warhol museum is, of course, far too kind in calling Warhol's old junk a "serial work" but I have to admit this appeals to my own sense of obsessiveness, which I think is behind every urge to collect. Sadly, my collecting urges are mostly stillborn, and I have neither the drive nor the money to collect on the scale Warhol did. The best I do, I guess, is that I collect a bunch of links. But this Warhol thing is something I would have found amazingly cool when I was about ten or so, and would've no doubt started my own time capsule that afternoon. And would have abandoned it within a month.