Simplicity is the new religion, with every shelter magazine touting the mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. Fortunately for Barbara Hodgson, she doesn’t read such dross.

”Even if I did,” she says, laughing down the line from her North Vancouver home, “I’d probably say, ‘To heck with them. I’m going to go do my own thing.’”

Hodgson’s thing encompasses a healthy respect for reusing and recycling; you could even say her career has been built upon these principles. Reduction, however, holds no appeal for this novelist, travel historian, and graphic artist. Instead, she’s all about accumulation. Hodgson loves the restless quest for the interesting image, object, or anecdote, and she’s never happier than when touring the souks and flea markets of the world.

Her search for the odd has taken her to the Falkland Islands, to the bazaars of Cairo and Damascus, to shady Shanghai alleys, and to the cavernous Croatian Cultural Centre right here in town. Along the way she’s accumulated binders full of vintage postcards, stacks of historical prints, a museum-grade collection of antique drug paraphernalia, and enough Persian rugs to turn her home into a pasha’s seraglio.

Hodgson’s latest book suggests that she’s found a way to use even her most eccentric acquisitions. Unlike her earlier thematic histories, Trading in Memories: Travels Through a Scavenger’s Favorite Places (Greystone Books, $29.95) jumps all over the map, from Paris to Budapest to Portland, and from antique lace to Arabic typewriters to cigarette tins. It’s a voyage of discovery, but the wonders unearthed don’t involve mountaineering garb, scuba tanks, or the superhuman stamina of a Wilfred Thesiger. Instead, her sport is a kind of extreme shopping, with beautiful bargain-basement prizes.

Hodgson’s latest passion is antique wooden painting kits and, by extension, vintage artists’ supplies of all kinds. She explains that her chance discovery of some unopened jars of pigment from the late 1800s has recently led to yet another book.

When she showed her flea-market find to bookbinder Claudia Cohen, the latter was immediately enthused. “She said, ‘Oh, I’ve got this amazing collection of colour wheels and colour charts,’” Hodgson recalls. “And then she went away back home to Seattle, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow! Colour wheels and colour charts! Wouldn’t it be great to do a book on colour?’ And so we’ve just finished 30 copies of a book called The Temperamental Rose and Other Ways of Seeing Colour. It’s a limited-edition book of 16 colour charts, all hand-coloured, and it was basically the result of seeing something that really, really inspired me, buying it, and then showing it to somebody who had a response that triggered an idea.

”When things work like that,” she adds, “it’s just fabulous, because you know that you’ve got this gut reaction that’s going to turn into something that you’re really satisfied with.”

Two hundred years from now someone will discover a dusty copy of Trading in Memories or The Temperamental Rose in some lunar bazaar. And they’ll thrill to Hodgson’s magpie vision, because the human impulse to collect is as primal and eternal as the eye’s need for beauty.

Barbara Hodgson appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival on October 21 at 10:30 a.m. at Festival House (1398 Cartwright Street).