I collect chopsticks.
No, not the fancy kind made of wood with a gold inlay, the cheap ass kind you get at the sushi bar. Sometimes they have the name and address of the restaurant on the wrapper, sometimes they don’t, I collect them all. 
I have almost a hundred different pair. WOOO HOOO!!
Here’s a link for people that collect banana stickers:
BTW, that’s the wierdest freakin URL that I’ve ever seen.
None of mine are really exciting, but definitely fun. I collect PEZ dispensers (I have over 150), those celebrity Got Milk? ads (i lost count around 97), and the statehood quarters. I only do the quarters because I figure someday, they’ll be worth something.
I used to know a kid who collected toenail clippings…rather gross, actually…
I used to collect comic books.
I semi-collect Transformers robot toys, though I’m rather picky about which ones I get.
The closest thing I have to a “real” collection (as in everything in the set) would be my collection of Atari Lynx portable video game system cartridges. Aside from a few obscure home-brewed titles, I’ve got all of 'em. And while I still enjoy my collection, a part of me wonders why I didn’t save the money for a “worthier” cause…
(Gad, I am getting old.)
A collection of glass bottled sodas (all still full):[ul][li] Coca Cola (American)[/li][li] Coca Cola (short Korean)[/li][li] Coca Cola (tall Korean)[/li][li] Coca Cola (Mexican)[/li][li] 7[sup]Up[/sup] (green glass)[/li][li] Wink (Canada Dry)[/li][li] Orange Crush (art deco bottle)[/li][li] Squirt (green spiral glass)[/li][li] Sprite (green nubbed glass)[/li][li] Peñafiel Mineral Water (enameled label)[/li][li] Limonatta (Italian)[/li][li] Arinchatta (Itallian)[/li][li] Sport (Italian)[/ul]And the grand winner is:[ul] G&L Green Ramune[/li]
This is a spectacular Korean specimen (perhaps Astroboy will drop by and tell us about it). I have an extra sample that is empty in order to demonstrate the remarkable marble seal. A spheroid of glass (the marble) is used as a sort of cork that must be dislodged in order to open the bottle. A sharp blow to the cap will knock it into the bottle. The flask must be oriented specifically so that the marble will roll into special pocks that hold it while you are drinking. Otherwise it will roll up and block the bottle when you tilt it. It is one of the oddest mechanical closures that I have ever seen on a food product.[/ul]
I also collect really odd electronic and solid state component specimens but I’ll save that for later.
Since I love to cook, a significant part of my collections are devoted to kitchen related themes. Such as:
[li] Cast Iron Ware.[/li]Square pans, round pans, molded pans, trivits, griddles, flat irons, dutch ovens, muffin pans and clothing irons. A mongolian barbecue grill, a comal and many others. Almost one hundred different pieces.
[li] Enamel Cook Ware.[/li]Le Cruset and Descoware (bought for pennies on the dollar), somewhere around one hundred pieces by now. Skillets, pots, kettles, terreines and grautins. All in the uranium orange.
[li] Pyrex.[/li]Hundreds of colored and clear pieces (like your grandma had). Nesting bowl sets, refrigerator jars, timbales, baking and serving dishes.
[li] Kitchen Gadgets.[/li]The oddball little aluminum things like garlic presses (20), lemon squeezers, olive or cherry pitters, tomato, egg, mushroom and butter slicers, the little Jello molds.
[li] Cookbooks.[/li]Well over a thousand of these. A copy of the Joy of Cooking that refers to prohibition. Nearly every cusine on earth is represented in the library. An Army cookbook where each recipe serves one hundred people. A Nancy Drew cookbook. A Danish girl scouts cookbook.
[li] Spice Containers and Miniature Tins.[/li]All sorts of small containers plus a four story spice rack to hold the ones that I use for cooking.
[li] Danish Crystal and Glass.[/li]Stemware and art glass bottles and vases.
[li] Oddball Stuff.[/li]Tortilla presses, taco shell fryers, muffin pans.
Now we’ll get into the other stuff:
[li] Cigar Boxes.[/li]Over ten thousand of these ranging from antique to modern.
[li] Meerschaum Pipes.[/li]Unused and handcarved pipes from Turkey.
[li] Tobacco and Cigarette Tins.[/li]From Camel cigarette tins all the way to Pince Albert in a can. Chewing tobacco to Dunhill samplers.
And the weirdest thing of all is that I don’t smoke tobacco!
On to more stuff:
[li] Semiconductor and Computer.[/li]Sapphire and gallium arsenide wafers. Patterned and raw silicon wafers from 1" to 8" in diameter, polished and unpolished. Electron multipliers, ferrite core planes, hundreds of different style chip packages, microwave components, solid state lasers, printed circuit boards. Displays ranging from LED readouts to Nixie tubes. Computer configuration patch boards, IBM punch cards and punched paper tape. Ion collectors, electron beam evaporation hearths, moving mirror optics, photomasks, leadframes, sockets, components, connectors, lamps, electron microscope filaments. Klystron tubes and turbomolecular pumping rotors.
My brother said that my collection belongs in the Smithsonian.
[li] Lasers and Optics.[/li]A 20mW Argon gas laser, a 5mW HeNe gas laser, several other gas laser tubes. Moving mirror optics, diffraction gratings, beam splitters, lenses, micrometer optical mounts and vernier slides. A home made variable speed three stage moving mirror Lissajou pattern generator.
[li] Books.[/li]Old Audel manuals that tell you how to build everything from houses to tram lines. Perry Mason, fantasy, Sci-Fi, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy all sorts of good stuff. Mostly in hard bound. An Encyclopedia Britannica atlas that contains a coupon for a free updated copy of the atlas when the borders are settled after World War II. All sorts of references.
[li] Musical Instruments.[/li]A piano, tenor and alto flutes, bamboo, rosewood and ceramic flutes, penny whistles, tenor, alto and soprano recorders, guitars, electric guitars, bass guitar, amplifiers, straight soprano, alto and C-melody saxophones plus analog synthesizers, harmonicas, kalimba, echoplex effects systems, and lots of others that I play for fun.
[li] Electronic Equipment.[/li]Stereos, tape decks. studio equipment, short wave radios, meters, video pattern generators, oscilloscopes and test equipment, geiger counters.
[li] Tools.[/li]Mostly limited to a real life tool kit that I use to repair anything from a million dollar semiconductor reactor to my own car. A stereoscope, calipers and micrometers.
[li] Nikon Cameras and Lenses.[/li]The old style bullet proof metal body cameras (Nikkormat and F1’s) with the super-fine lenses that they used to make. All manual settings, none of these PhD (push here dummy) Brownie Hawkeyes for me. Plus tons of other photographic gear like tripods, vests, camera bags, light meters, slide projectors, screens and other gadgets.
[li] Marbles.[/li]Real aggies and other gemstone spheres. Old style daws, bumblebees, corkscrews, ox bloods, steelies and cats eyes.
[li] Sea Shells.[/li]Abalones, textile cones, local species, miniature shells.
[li] Licorice.[/li]A dozen different types from all over Europe including Italian, Danish and Dutch.
[li]Posters.[/li]Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore, Carousel Ballroom, Fillmore East and many museum event posters.
[li] Hats.[/li]Stetsons, Akubras, fedoras, cowboy, straw, berets.
[li] Pennies.[/li]Completely full five gallon water bottle. Many other bottles full as well.
[li] Drafting Equipment.[/li]Drafting sets (Deitzgen, Kuffel and Esser), templates, ink bottles, Rapidograph pens, calligraphy pens, rulers and T-squares, drafting machines.
[li] Knives.[/li]
The Mountaineer, The Champion, and other Swiss Army knives, a Gerber lock blade and mother of pearl scaled penknife, a long blade fruit sampling knife, heirloom pearl handled carving set, Buck fisherman and others.
As you can see, most of the stuff actually has value. I do not collect figurines or anything from the Franklin Mint. My collections have a cumulative value of somewhere around one hundred thousand dollars. I guess I’m going to have to set up a second hand store when I get older.
Antique oil cans! Not like the retail pennzoil cans; I mean the little (and not so little) ones used to oil tools, etc. I started because my husband was collecting old tools and I kept running into them. Did I ever tell you about the time I was trying to clean one using mineral spirits and a wire brush on a dremel tool? And how I dipped the brush–while the tool was still on–into an open bowl of the decades-old-oil-stained spirits? In my WHITE kitchen? Classic Cranky move.
Also frogs. Of all types.
Zenster: Wow! How big is your house?
My great aunt collected owls. Not real ones, knick-nacks and pictures and stuff. They were all over the house, right down to the toilet seat cover. She had a huge display of ceramic owls in the livingroom on shelves around the fireplace. I loved getting letters from her because she had every type of stationery with owls you could imagine.
It wasn’t her idea, actually. Somewhere along the line she got a couple and everyone from then on decided to give them to her for every occasion.
People tried doing that to me with knick-nacks. I nipped that in the bud right quick.
rivulus
Books - between us, my husband and I have about 2500 or so, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but we have at least one of everything.
Beads - any substance other than plastic. I’m quite the snob about it. I have amethyst, garnet, antique trade beads, African handmade, eggshell, hematite, bone…
Stuff. I make things, so I have: feathers (budgie, parrot, raven, magpie, even a couple eagle feathers), bones, copper wire, silver wire, agates, soapstone, jade, leather, shells, willows, cedar, and mastodon ivory. It’s referred to as Mom’s Junk, so I guess that makes it a collection.
Hey, Zenster, how’s your collection of drive platters? I got some out of a really old server drive that are a good 8 inches across - if you mix them with other sizes they make great wind chimes. Especially if you use the spacers to provide the high notes. Warning If you do this, hang it well away from the house. These things are LOUD.
Shot glasses from places I’ve been.
Dog statues. (Mostly little collectable figurines, really.)
-Rue.
I have a collection of dust balls.
I keep it under my bed.
Wow. Zenster wins! I’d love to browse through that cookbook collection.
I collect skulls & interesting bones. Only ones I find count. I travel a lot, so I’ve got animal skulls & bones from several countries, including a donkey skull from Israel, and a horse skull from Baja. Lots of delicate bird bones, & some small mammals we can’t identify. My SO (who is a doctor) has a whole human skeleton in his living room, wearing sunglasses.
I have friends who collect things like frog artifacts, shot glasses, tacky religious souvenirs…it’s always easy & fun to buy gifts for people who have collections.
I have a collection of about 20 firearms, from replica Colt 1851 Navy revolvers to AR-15s. One of the neatest is a Winchester Mod. 1892 in .32-20 that was made in 1897.
Watches. A Zodiac from the 1950s (dad’s), a 1974 Seiko Bell-Matic (dad’s), my first watch – a Timex from about 1971, a Rolex GMT Master II, a Fossil with an airplane on the dial, a military-issue Stocker & Yale, and a Lorus Quartz from the early-80s.
Knives. Too many to list in entirety, but six Victorinox, four Case, a couple of folding parachute knives with a blade and a shroud cutter, a Gerber Mk. II, a Valor copy of a Gerber Mk. I, bayonettes for my Mausers, a Cold Steel SRK, and more.
Flight Jackets. I think about a dozen including G-1s, A-2s, CWU-45/Ps, a CWU-36/P, MA-1s, two issue WEPs and a copy.
Navy flight gear. Everything a Naval aviator would wear (including the S&W snubnosed .38) except for the radio (which at $1,400 is a little pricey).
I collect handbags and unique clothes, most of which I buy from ebay or from markets. I also collect minature liquor bottles - I figure that if I ever get sick of collecting them, I can still put the liquor to good use.
Music boxes.
Holiday decorations.
Music boxes with holiday themes!
Do you know how hard it is to find decorations for labor day?
I collect movie lobby cards–not the full size ones (can’t afford them), but ones transferred to postcard size. I stopped counting after 1000.
I also collect stamps–anything directly related to movies (films, but more often film personalities). Often, for a first-day of issue, I will submit said stamp with said related postcards for a first-day cover. I have managed to get some pretty cool ones over the years (cool for a Filmatelic geek like myself at least)
I also have hundreds of movie soundtracks on CD (original scores, not pop hit compilations) including quite a few imports or OOP titles.
Naturally, I have everything catalogued and cross-referenced, which means I’m an archivist at home as much as I am at work.
I collect lizardy/reptiley things. Sort of collect anyway (haven’t bought anything in ages… must get more sometime).
Current inventory is:
2 cheap little plastic lizards (one a skink and the other some variety of bearded lizard, I think)
A ‘family’ of 3 little stone crocodiles
Another piece with two crocodiles on it (it got dropped at one stage and has a big chip out of it now though :()
A slightly less little and really cute stone dragon
A little pewter frilled neck lizard (which I use when I play Monopoly :))
A little pewter thorny devil
A ring in the shape of a snake
A sand-filled cloth lizard
Another sand-filled cloth lizard, but this one is on my keyring
A plastic crocodile that was formally on my keyring, but it fell off
A poster of a blue-tongued lizard that I got out of a Nature magazine
A poster of a photo frilled neck lizard
Another poster of a frilled neck lizard, but not a photograph
A stone frilled neck lizard
Damn, now I have a craving to go find more lizards.
Dunno if this counts as a collection, but we’ve bought about 11 or 12 signed, numbered prints by a favorite artist. Sadly, most of them are in a closet because it costs so doggone much to have them properly matted and framed, and since we own that hole in the water that sucks up all our money…
Beyond that, I don’t really collect anything, tho I have accumulated a bunch of kitchen stuff. To my mind, “collectables” are things that need to be dusted. No thank you very much.
I collect, ravenously, moose items. I love mooses. I have a thousand million stuffed mooses, moose christmas ornaments, a wooden nickel with a moose on it, moose dice, moose crossing sign. MOOSES! They’ll Stamp You To Death! They’re my favorite animal.
I also, sort of inadvertantly, collect German things. Everyone I know buys me German things because, I am, of course, The Germaniac. I have all kinds of German candy and cookie boxes, I get like 6 lebekuchens every Christmas, german beer bottles, soccer jerseys…blah blah blah…
those are my two big collections.
jarbaby
Well, my collections are pretty mainstream.
Shot glasses- I started buying them as cheap souvenirs of places I’d been. Then people started buying them for me when they went on trips. Then I discovered eBay. Right now I have about 200 or so, most of which advertise touristy stuff, hotels, bars or liquor.
Car brochures- I’m a motorhead, always have been. When was a kid my dad used to take me to car shows and we’d snap up anything the exhibitors were giving away. After I discovered the car swap meets in Carlisle, PA and started buying stuff on eBay I ended up with a collection of American car literature that spans the era from 1965-present. One of these days I’ll get around to organizing it. . .
Model cars- See above. I was collecting die-cast metal models before they were cool. Right now I have too damn many toy cars to count, ranging from Matchbox/Hot Wheels that I snagged at Wal-Mart last week to a 1:12 scale pink '59 Cadillac convertible.
I also collect US Mint proof and uncirculated coin sets and statehood quarters. BTW, does anybody out West want to swap some Denver quarters for Philadelphia quarters?
Yer pal,
Zappo