I’d like to see some pictures of your collection. I have a few myself. I went through a big Tiki phase a few years ago. I still like Tiki, but it doesn’t really fit in my house. I’ve got glasses and an old Kaluha bottle and a Pisco bottle that are all in a Tiki- motife. Not to mention a couple of great books, like The Big Book of Tiki.
I also have a coolection of bakelite desksets. They usually have a pen that requires a fountain tip, a letter opener, mechanical pencils and a wax seal.
Oooooooooooooo [size=1] We really need an emoticon that looks like Spongebob doing the ooooooooo…impressive/fascinating face.[/size
I collect postcards too. And travel brochures of where we’ve been. I use to collect spoons, but that was kinda majorly dorky and I definately hated displaying them, so they are strung on fish line and hung on an Xmas tree every so often.
Embracing my inner dork, I collect stamps. All over the world any style. I am not picky at all. There use to be, probably still is, a place on the web Melissa’s Stamp Exchange, where you list what you would like to trade and what you are looking for. I really enjoyed doing that and had some nice letters from complete strangers. And I would probably make any stamp person faint when I say they are kept in a nice cardboard box atop my closet shelf. I take them down every so often and go, " Ooooh, pretty."
Anyone outside of the US who wants to add to my collection of cancelled stamps, I would be very happy to get them.
Cinnamon & Laina send me an email, I might have a few PC to feed your collection. If you don’t mind it postmarked from Michigan. ( I’m such a fraud.)
I’m the type (read: nosy) who loves to look at other’s collections.
There used to be someone here who had a homepage dedicated to their music (I don’t recall their screen name – but their favorite album was ‘Trick of the Tail’ by Genesis.
Fishbicycle & Mr. Blue Sky (my old 6@6 cohorts), do either of you have your collections catalog(u)ed either on your own web page or at a site like Rate Your Music.com? Just curious.
Julia’s Post Card Exchange with links to other link minded people in more exotic locals.
I just found this, so I have no idea if it is any good.
As with folks above, \SF Books and comic books. I particularly collect english translations of Jules Verne, because they’re so hard to come by. The man was the stephen King of his time. He wrote over 60 novels, almost all of which have been translated into english, and most of which have, at some point, been published in paperback. But just try to find them.
A much better writer than he;s generally given credit for, and with a much greater range than you’d guess by only watching movies ostensibly based on his work (and which generally falls far short of his vision). If you can, read The Annotated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon (both with annotations by Walter James Miller, who later published his own translation of 20,000 Leagues) to see just how detailed his work was, how he has been misunderstood, and abused by his translators.
I also collect maneki nekos, those Japanese waving cats you often see in Asian restaurants and markets. I really only have four, but my rule of thumb is that three of anything is a “collection.” I like Japanese culture and I love cats, so it seemed like a natural progression for me–but I can’t ever see collecting them like I do with comics or DVDs.
Me too! I always looked at peoples’ record collections when I went visiting. Sorry, I don’t have any websites at all. My collection is being listed in a MS Works database. If you have Works, I’d be happy to e-mail you the .wdb files for the singles and albums databases. At this stage, they are still works in progress, but you’ll find a lot of cool information. I go way beyond Title and Artist.
I have a little rubber one attached to my purse – they’re supposed to be good luck, right? The administrative assistant at work gave me one after I broke my ankle last year – and I haven’t broken any bones since, so apparently it works. 
I used to collect orange dinosaurs 'til I got up around fifty and just grew tired of them taking up that much space.
Now I collect yaoi manga, a genre of ladies comics from Japan as well as textbooks on Japanese. And interesting chopsticks which are great because they don’t take up much room at all.
I collect silver coins. When I graduated college I got 6 silver dollars from that year and gave them to the 6 people who had most influenced my life at that time. I bought an extra one for me - since I also had influenced my life somewhat. 
After that I just started collecting more and more.
I save all of my movie tickets. I’ve have a record of every movie I’ve seen in the theater since December of 1999 (The Green Mile). I keep them taped onto notebook paper and put the paper behind those clear plastic sheets in a notebook. I’m not sure why I started collecting them. It’s just something I do now.
I like collecting fossils. Partly because of the fun of looking for them and partly because you’re holding something in your hand that lived and breathed millions of years ago. It’s just so cool.
I also like collecting buttons. Not clothing buttons but the pin-on kind, especially if they say something weird or funny. I rarely wear them though, because I’m afraid of losing them. The absolute strangest button I ever found was propped up on a lamppost base outside the Fine Arts department at the university where I work. It was in the shape of a little dancing skeleton man in a top hat, with a little word balloon coming from him that said “CATCH YOU LATER”. It was attached to a card. The card read:
He’s suave,
He’s debonair,
He dances
Like Fred Astaire.
Mr. Death is always waiting there,
To take you home.
Until then, he says,
“Catch You Later.”
It’s creepy cool, and I love it. According to the logo on the card it’s from some shop in B.C. called “Man/Woman”. How it came to be propped up on a lamppost in Ontario, I have no idea.
Forgot about my box of postcards. I have my favorite ones on a cork board in my room (like when my great-grandmother took a trip to Stavanger, Norway), but most of them are in an Amazon.com box. I do know why I started this one: when my grandmother moved out of her house and into a retirement community, she gave us lots of photos and postcards collected by her and my great-grandmother. Some of the earliest are from 1907.
My inherent nosiness prompted me to start this thread, but I have to pat myself on the back here, because this is one of the most fascinating threads I’ve ever read! You all have such INTERESTING collections!
For awhile, the kid was collecting rocks. It started when she was little and she picked up a hunk of broken asphalt alongside a walking path. “For my rock collection,” she said. Being indulgent parents, we duly labeled it and set it on a shelf in her room. My mom went to Florida on a trip and brought a rock back for her. Then the WryGuy went to Ohio and brought back a rock. THEN… things got interesting. Some friends of ours went to China to adopt their daughter. They stopped alongside the Great Wall and picked up a rock, then took a photo of themselves in front of the Wall. They brought the photo and the rock back from China. Over the next few years, she managed to collect one rock from each of 17 states and England and Australia, with photos of the rock picker-uppers picking up the rocks. Sadly, she hit 13 and decided that rock collecting was beneath her - and she tossed everything 
Is the Brattle Book Store still in existence? When I lived in Boston, 30 years ago, I was able to pick up some US editions of Verne from the 1870s for a couple of bucks each. I’m sure they were pirated as was common at the time, and none particularly obscure.
I collect Gideon Bibles.
I collect bowls. I have some terrific vases, too, but what I really love are bowls. Most of them are good sized and they take up a lot of space so I only have a couple dozen or so. Ceramic, glass, wicker, grass, metal, painted, clear. Last year I bought a huge nambe bowl at a garage sale for $10! And I bought a set of 3 Revere silver bowls at the thrift store; it was only when I got them home that I realized they were actually someone’s engraved bowling trophies! But I don’t care, they’re shiny.
I also have a lot of books and CDs, but they’re not really collections per se, as I use them. Of course I keep momentos from my sister’s shows & our vacations. And I have a lot of cool posters & prints, including some I bought in East Berlin (unfortunately they’re beat to hell).
Hubby collects everything! Stamps, coffee mugs, stuffed animals, comic book action figures he made, vintage stamp covers, comic books (inactive), puzzles, baseball cards (also inactive), rocks, political memorabilia; I’m sure there’s more, every time I open a closet I find a collection of something. Oh, and porn. Like I don’t know what’s on our hard drive :rolleyes: ;).
Brand new member checking in!
I collect insects, which I know is supposed to make me a) incredibly nerdy, or b) downright freakish. I was always fascinated by insects as a kid, and when I was about five or six, my dad gave me a couple of boxes of museum surplus specimens he’d gotten from a family friend who was an entomologist in Brazil. Those formed the core of a steadily-growing collection of my own, which went on until I was about 16 or so. At that point, my complete lack of dating success with a particular girl who was, by her own admission, severely entomophobic, led me to completely drop the hobby for a number of years. The old collection moldered in a closet and was reduced to dust in a few months due to the depredations of carpet beetles and my lack of maintenance.
Fast forward about ten years (through college and med school and into residency) and I decided, almost out of the blue, that I would take up the hobby again, and do it right this time. And I haven’t looked back since.