What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?

When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds of collectors: normal people.

Most of us at some point have had a little collection on the go – stamps, pebbles, gonks, succulents, Pokémon cards. I remember at school there was always great competition for Panini football stickers: everyone seemed forever to be in search of the elusive Kenny Dalglish.

Of course there will always be hoarders of knick-knacks, old tools, novelty nut-crackers, Northern Dairies milk bottles and goodness knows what else. I know someone who collects toenail clippers and another who collects snow globes and embroidered slippers – a mini V & A in the making. My uncle Dave used to search for those Bell’s Whisky ceramic decanter things. Charles Kane he most certainly was not: Dave was a minicab driver from Basildon.

Paper ephemera is perhaps the most delightful and affordable stuff for the average person. It’s cheap, durable and doesn’t take up too much space. No need for your Hearst castle, or even a drinks cabinet or shelf above the sideboard: you can keep your collection of pre-war bus tickets in a ringbinder in a drawer. The curator Ingrid Swenson preserves her collection in a dozen black presentation folders.

Swenson has amassed other people’s shopping lists. Her book is a beautifully produced catalogue of this collection, though catalogue is perhaps too strong a word. It’s just a small, dense, thick book full of colour reproductions of the hundreds – in excess of a thousand – of shopping lists found by her at the Waitrose on the Holloway Road in London over a period of about ten years, plus a few pages of explanatory text.