For Egyptian Collector, No Object's Too Dusty Or Trivial For 'Mosaic Of Our History'
Amgad Naguib collects old ticket stubs, wigs, letters and toothbrushes that he says tell Egypt's history. "I am sure I have more dresses and hats and handbags than you and all your friends," he says.
Amgad Naguib is a collector of ephemera — the fleeting, fragile and often overlooked objects of everyday life.
The old matchbooks, toothbrushes and ticket stubs — a few of the objects among hundreds of thousands in his collections — normally spill from bags and boxes in his overstuffed Cairo warehouses. But for two months, a small part of his unusual collection was exhibited at a downtown Cairo art gallery, under a title borrowed from the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk: "The Past Is Always an Invented Land."
And it's a strange land Naguib inhabits — straddling the line between collection and obsession.
"You know ephemera? I learned the word from eBay,"
