Their favorite things

Rockefeller College Master Jeff Nunokawa describes this desire for collecting, speculating that it derives from a particular stage in one’s life.

“Collecting is particularly attractive to people in the middle of their lives,” Nunokawa said. The passion for collecting “is not the need to eat or a sexual urge; it’s a mild passion. It’s also one about hope that your life will last long enough to sustain the collection. ... It’s both a consolation for the lost part of your life and a promise for the future of your life.”

Whether or not Nunokawa’s interpretation applies to other faculty collectors, the hobbies of Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin, physics professor Robert Austin and assistant psychology professor Ken Norman represent eclectic examples of how these men have transformed their offices into pieces of self-expression and edification.

A penny saved

Visitors to Dobkin’s Nassau Hall office are greeted by a tall, winding mountain of neatly stacked pennies, sorted by year and minting location.

“People have come in here, looked at the pennies and asked, ‘So is this where Princeton keeps its endowment?’ ” Dobkin said.

From the looks of it, the scenario seems distinctly possible. In fact, the sheer volume of his penny collection compelled Dobkin to choose a collecting strategy early on. His policy is that he will pay no more than a penny for a penny.

“I essentially could go for quality or quantity,” Dobkin said. “For example, I’m missing a few years, and I could go this afternoon on eBay and get them if I wanted, but then I’d have to pay more for the penny.”

For Dobkin, the value of his collection comes from its overall aesthetic appeal rather than the individual worth of particular coins.

“I don’t place values on individual pennies,” Dobkin said. “Every penny is good.”

Whenever he is running low on the copper coins, he goes to the bank, cashes in $10 worth of pennies and sorts the tubes of change. His resulting penny display resembles a histogram, with more pennies from recent years and fewer pennies from earlier years.

For Dobkin, penny collecting began on a whim about six years ago. Previously, he had saved pennies from before 1959, which have the wheat-sheet back instead of the Lincoln Memorial. When his daughters and son were young, he started sorting pennies with them. While his children grew up and lost track of the hobby, Dobkin’s passion was just beginning.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“The sorting is very relaxing,” Dobkin said. “Especially if you’re obsessive compulsive, you can do it instead of eating.”

Dobkin’s collection started at his house, where he would sort pennies into Whitman tubes that hold 50 pennies each. He would then stack the Whitman tubes around his kitchen, sometimes four tubes high.

“Some of these stacks would fall down during the night, and we would find pennies scattered along the counter the next morning,” Dobkin said. “My wife decided it was time for the pennies to move outside of our house.”

Luckily, this ultimatum came just around the same time Dobkin was moving into his new office.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to move the display,” Dobkin said.

As for holding the University’s endowment, Dobkin politely declines.

“It turns out that Princeton’s endowment is bigger than the number of pennies that have been made since 1909, the year the Lincoln-head penny was introduced,” he said.

Dobkin also has extensive snow globe, owl and bottle cap collections.

Inspector Gadget

Austin’s office in Jadwin Hall is brimming with gizmos and gadgets. His colleague, physics professor Nai Phuan Ong, described the room as a Toys “R” Us for nerds. For Austin, the toy collection serves as a refreshing reminder of the joy found in science.

“There’s a lesson from all of these toys,” Austin said. “There is physics in everyday objects. It’s a matter of extracting that information that is interesting.”

While he has never officially counted them, Austin estimates he has roughly 100 toys and gizmos decorating his room. A floating atomic clock sits on his desk, a holographic pig brightens the center table, and a smoke- ring maker looms innocently along the ledge.

“Everything here has a physics purpose to it,” Austin said.

When Austin first came to Princeton 25 years ago, he invented a toy that modeled a biological membrane. Notably, this membrane barrier was able to concentrate particles from one side of the toy to the other just through Brownian motion.

“Theoretically, this should be impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics,” Austin said.

He also made a soliton machine, an interwoven line of nails with sapphire bearings.

“A soliton is a wave which travels in space and doesn’t spread out,” Austin said. “Normal water waves spread out. In certain circumstances, however, waves don’t spread.”

He gave the nails on one end of the soliton machine a spin, and a circular wave propagated down the device.

Austin incorporates his toys into his physics precepts.

“I think it’s important while teaching to bring in demos,” Austin said. “I try to bring in a demonstration every class. It really helps reinforce the physics lessons.”

During one lesson on optics, his PHY 102: Introductory Physics II precept used mirrors to burn a slice of pizza. Austin noted how toys balance Princeton’s sometimes stressful environment.

“I think it’s important to have fun in physics and science,” Austin said. “The toys make you take it a little less seriously. Toys make you relax a little bit. I think that’s an important lesson.”

One for the books

Nunokawa’s office in McCosh Hall is a spectacle of souvenirs documenting iconic moments in his life. The space is not so much a room as a walk-in scrapbook, in which every inch is filled with posters, books, ladders, lamps, calendars, maps, flags, Japanese prints, magazines, photos, postcards, a typewriter and pictures of movie star Keanu Reeves.

“This is the only room in the world for which I am fully responsible,” Nunokawa said. “This is my life. This is an outward representation of the chaos which is my mind.”

Ostensibly a collector of numerous eclectic objects, Nunokawa specializes in collecting books, which line three walls around his office.

“I have five different book repositories,” Nunokawa said.

His five libraries include his McCosh office, his Rockefeller office, the Rockefeller master’s house, his apartment in New York and his bedroom in his mother’s home. Having five libraries, however, comes with both advantages and disadvantages.

“The disadvantage is I have no idea where my books are half the time,” Nunokawa said.

His book collection ranges from the scholarly to the sentimental. Nunokawa commemorates his love of threadbare volumes with his facebook.com group: “Rotting Beautiful Old Books, Worthless to Most People.”

“So many of these books are falling apart but are important to me just to have,” Nunokawa said.

While Nunokawa uses websites like amazon.com and eBay for academic purposes, in terms of recreational reading he is devoted to the traditional used-book store.

“It’s more than just buying the book,” Nunokawa said. “It’s about the whole relationship with the proprietor.”

He is a regular at a West Village bookstore in New York.

“I know the guy who runs the book store well,” Nunokawa said. “The conversation starts with books. It’s a little like going to a baseball game or fishing. It’s supposed to be about the fishing or baseball, but it’s actually about the relationship that takes place.”

Figurine army

Norman has a miscellaneous collection of about 200 figurines strewn around his office in Green Hall. The figures range from zombies, to cops and robbers, to an origami Jabba the Hutt, to rubber finger puppets.

Looking around the room, he ponders for a bit and concludes that he can’t remember how it all began.

“You just start having some things like this, and people realize you like things of that sort,” Norman said. “And they start giving them to you and it snowballs. And all of a sudden you have a lot of these things.”

Norman’s first figurine dates back to high school. The blue monster with big pointy ears and splotches of red guards his desk threateningly. The other objects around the room — many gifts from students and friends — are also unique.

“[The figurines] are defined by what makes me happy when I look at them,” Norman said. “I haven’t tried to catalog them or even to arrange them artfully.”

Norman also keeps figures in his office for his two daughters, who have carefully labeled a zombie man missing an arm “Dad.”

As a rule, Norman looks for objects that are entertaining, not any specific collectibles.

“There are stores in New York that have very expensive limited-edition vinyl collectible action figures of various sorts,” Norman said. “I’d much prefer to have 20 finger puppet monsters than those things.”

While others pursue their hobbies out of a primarily sentimental attachment, for Norman, the value of his collection comes from the ensemble appeal.

“It’s the chaos of having all of these different objects roaming around my desk,” Norman said.