So, what do you collect?
(Excuse me if this question has been asked before; I searched threads but couldn’t find it anywhere. It is inspired by the “How Many Books Do You Own?” thread, wherein some posters had mentioned collecting certain genres of books or those put out by certain publishers, First Editons, etc.).
For me, my SO would answer “Too many things”, but she does admit that she finds them all to be interesting and is very encouraging to me about all of them.
When I was six, I started collecting stamps. Within a couple of years, I branched out to coins, and then in my early teens I got interested in foreign paper money, since it was money and was usually printed by the same printers that printed stamps, so it was a kind of natural overlap.
When I was about kindergarten age, my mom started reading The Hardy Boys to my younger brother and I, one chapter a night before bedtime. During that time (the mid 60s), I remember seeing different versions of the same book in the stores, either with different cover art or with a different story, and when I started school, I noticed that some of the ones they had there had the same brown covers on multiple volumes; in time I learned that they had originally been released with book jackets. Eventually, when I started getting my own money, I started collecting Hardy Boys books, and was amazed to find that there were different printings, etc., all collectible.
When I was a teenager, I lived in a small town in the middle of tourist country, frequented by American fishermen in the summer and American hunters in the fall. They would bring with them their own beer in cans, and the cans would wind up at the dump, as they had no return premium. This coincided with my then-part time job working on the town garbage truck, and it was because of this that I then started to collect beer cans, because there were so many different types and they were colourful.
Naturally, like most kids of the era, I collected bubble gum cards. Over time, I would formalize (i.e., get serious about) my collection and specialize in collecting hockey cards.
Also, while I lived in tourist country, I had an accumulation of Time and Life magazines fall into my lap. It turned out that someone who was a summer resident was cleaning out their summer home. Up in the attic were boxes of old Time and Life magazines dated between 1939 and 1962. They took these boxes of magazines out and set them out for the trash collection, and I found them, all 24 boxes of them, all in beautiful condition. There was no way I was going to take these to the dump, so I convinced the truck driver to take a swing by my place on the way out to the dump so I could drop them off. It took a little convincing on my part concerning my mom, expecially since they smelled musty, but ultimately, she agreed to let me keep them. Eventually, I filled in some of the missing issues, and even branched out to collecting other magazines, if they had a personality cover.
Eventually, it got to the point where I would buy “anything obviously old” if I saw it at a garage sale at a cheap enough price, for example old box cameras, or bakelite radios (the more colourful the better), but I am not really serious about these, they just make good things to display. The same is true of all the colourful 30s-70s cocktail shakers I’ve picked up. If you get a grouping of five or more of anything, it just looks more impressive.
So, what do you collect? Is there anything in particular you haunt garage sales trying to find?