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, moulded pans, trivits, griddles, flat irons, dutch ovens, muffin pans and clothing irons.
[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]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, including a prize Army cookbook where all recipes serve one hundred. Also the Nancy Drew cookbook and the 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]Pyrex Ware[/li]All of it in the old colors, including the refrigerator jars, mixing bowls and clear baking dishes and custard cups.
[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.
And the weirdest thing of all is that I don’t smoke tobacco!
On to more stuff:
[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.
[li]Posters[/li]These range from art to Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore posters from the sixties.
[li]Musical Instruments[/li]Flutes, guitars, electric guitars, amplifiers, saxophones and synthesizers, effects systems, and lots of others that I play for fun.
[li]Electronic Equipment[/li]Stereos, reel to reel tape decks. studio equipment, short wave radios, meters, video pattern generators, oscilloscopes and test equipment, geiger counters. Throw in a wire recorder here and a tube tester there.
[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.
[li]Old Nikon Cameras[/li]Nikkormat and F 1’s plus the Nikkor lenses to go with them. Plus the usual photographic stuff like tripods, slide projectors and screens.
[li]Camping Equipment[/li]Backpacking and picnic gear for outdoor fun and games.
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.
