A friend invited us over this past weekend for a holiday open house. They moved in a few months ago and so it was a combined housewarming/holiday get together.
On the invitation it said, “come see our nutcrackers, we have a lot”. I immediately imagined some of the high-tech, cool nutcrackers I’ve seen; hydraulic pistons, screws, etc. By “a lot” I was thinking 7. If you have seven nutcrackers, well, that’s a lot of nutcrackers compared to most people.
Boy, were we surprised. The nutcrackers were all of this type (which never crossed my mind originally):
And by “a lot” they meant 317. Yep, 317 nutcrackers were on display. There were roughly 280 in the living room on tiered table displays. There were also nutcrackers throughout the rest of the house. The smallest were ~4 inches tall, the largest around 5 feet tall. Some played music and danced. Each one was a bit different, but they were all pretty similar in appearance.
Background: The guy’s grandmother collected nutcrackers her whole life and he loved them. He bought his grandma a new one for every birthday she celebrated. When she died she left them for him. He has a section of their garage where they are wrapped/boxed/stored, along with the tables, etc. They are brought out for display in December and January.
I asked him if he were going to have a nut right now, which nutcracker would he choose. He told me they didn’t really like nuts.
The parents of a former co-worker of mine own a nutcracker museum in the town of Leavenworth, Washington. I toured it about 10 years ago, they had at least 3000 of them.
I have had a few collections over the years that are not typical collection items. Monopoly tokens and Crayola crayons were the largest. Sold off both collections but I still track both items. There have been over 4800 different Monopoly tokens made for retail games and another 600 add on tokens. There have been 1258 different color names given to Crayola crayons plus 300 or so colors that did not get official names. Add other brands of wax crayons and the number of names is approaching 5,000.
I used to collect “bendies” – poseable rubber-on-wire figurines. It started back in college when I bought a “Mr. Bendy” from the Archie McPhee catalog, then I just started buying more whenever I would see one in a store somewhere. I still have them all in a box under my bed. I pulled them out a while back to show my grandkids, but they weren’t impressed.
One of the great “collection” museums I’ve been to is the Tallahassee Auto Museum. Besides automobiles there are extensive collections of knives, golf ephemera, outboard motors, fishing lures, police badges, adding machines and cash registers, dolls, radios, time pieces, die-cast models…the list goes on.
I love going to local history museums and seeing the wide variety of donated collections on display, everything from salt and pepper shakers to pencils to matchbooks to rattlesnake rattles and beyond.
That sounds a little bit like House on the Rock, in southwestern Wisconsin. Beyond the house itself (which was apparently inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture), the complex features several displays of the original owner’s extensive collections, including carousel animals, automated music machines, suits of armor, Santa Claus figures, model ships, etc.
I saw a collection of barbed wire and a collection of barf bags at the Smithsonian.
The strangest collection I have is a collection of “found objects”. That is a collection of interesting things I’ve found laying on the ground.
I collect elephant figurines (and a few other elephant bits of art like jewelry) mostly found at estate sales and antique shops. Someone once tried to gift me a lamp that was an elephant on a ball, but it was too big. When I get home, I’ll try and post a picture of my collection so far, unless people figure it’s not weird enough .
I knew this guy who was obsessed with Warner Bros. porcelain figurines. His entire condo was filled with them, and he had them insured for like $75,000. Then the earthquake came, every single one of them smashed to bits, and the insurance company wrote him a check for $75,000. So far so good, right? So sad I lost my collection, but at least now I have $75,000 to keep me warm. I get that.
This guy, right after he was allowed to move back into his trashed condo, immediately replaced the collection, piece for piece. It mattered that much to him. Collections are weird, man.
I started collecting Native American arrowheads as a kid when I worked in fields in central Ohio along the Indiana borders. I now have over 500 arrowheads and assorted artifacts that I have either found myself or traded for with reputable people. Mine is a modest collection as I know people who have well over 3000 pieces. The Native Americans were quite active in the area I grew up in, killing and wounding over 900 American soldiers in one ambush battle in 1791.
I have a collection of rocks I’ve picked up at various places I’ve visited. They’re not really interesting to anyone but me. There’s nothing particularly special about any of them, and I don’t care about the geology. I just appreciate a cool-looking rock (and they’re free, unique souvenirs).
My aunt’s ex in-laws have the Guinness record for the most scales (as in scales you weigh things with). According to their record they had about 2500 in 1998 and about 3500 in 2010.
I have several hundred Seeburg ‘1000’ records, all containing about 40 minutes per side of background music from the 60s and 70s. If I were to play them for 24h/day it would take a month and a half to get through them all.
Seeburg background music is playing almost all of the time in my home.
You must be a distant relation to one of my wife’s friends back home in Brazil. This fellow has been collecting elephants all his life. When we last visited him, his condo was full of them, with most flat surfaces, including the top of his baby grand piano, covered with many different kinds of elephants.
He is a professional musician who performs internationally, so there are many people around the world who know him and his taste in elephants–these days I believe most of his elephants arrive as gifts.
My BluRay collection is big enough to rival some video stores, and I could conceivably play all my music CDs one after the other and not repeat a disc for well over a year, I’m sure.
For something more specific, I have a bookshelf entirely devoted to Doctor Who. I’m getting close to amassing all the BBC Books Past Doctors series, about half a dozen away from the Eighth Doctor series, and I’ve got all the tie-ins from Doctors nine through eleven. I don’t think I’ll have enough time to read them all before I shuffle off, but there they are.
All my collections are relatively normal- OTTOMH telephones, bats (as in the animal), comic books, Cthulhu, idols, obsolete computers, puzzles (not jigsaw puzzles- cubes, blacksmith puzzles, that kind of thing), and much more.
I wonder if they are interested in my kitchen mixer collection? I had one of the largest collections back when our online club was active. But the founder died and interest has dwindled. Here is an article about Nancy’s collection. I have over 120, mostly pre WWII. Nancy had more then that.
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