Welcome to the SDMB fam! I love insects too, but my “collection” only consists of two butterflies (Fivebar Swordtail and Common Indian Crow) and a big-ass dead dragonfly (don’t know which kind).
I’m not afraid of insects, but don’t have the heart (or expertise) to catch or mount them myself, and the collections you can buy are so darn expensive.
My butterflies are pretty, but I paid about $15 for them.
The dragonfly floated dead on its back over to me in a lake I was fishing at, so no loss there.
Thanks for the welcome, and it’s always good to meet another insect fan!
I can completely sympathize with folks who don’t have the heart to collect insects. I still sometimes feel bad, myself, even after 15+ years. But I do try to be conscientious and humane about it, and preserve them in such a way that the specimens could be useful for future study.
Amusingly, a certain number of specimens are from friends of mine who send me things they find in their gardens and ask me to identify them.
It is, but it’s not a particularly good source of Vernes (although I did get one of my Annotated Vernes there). Much better was The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore on Newbury street, where I was able to find many of the Ace paperback reprints. But the AVH is noe sadly gone, except online.
Aside from new printings of obscure Verne editions (like Paris in the 20th Century and Verne’s play, both published in English for the first time within the past ten years), I’ve had my best luck in obscure used-book shops, where I find old hardcover editions, usually pretty beaten up.
Casino chips. Just the garden variety $1 blackjack table kinda chip; no fancy commemoratives/collector items. I used to exchange chips with other far-flung collectors, but I now limit myself to casinos I’ve played in, so my collection isn’t growing very fast.
I collect ‘slider pens’ or ‘floater pens’. Those pens that have something in the liquid that slides back and forth as you tip it on it’s end. One end is a solid color like blue or red usually. Like this person: http://www.konky2000.com/Collection/Pens/
I liked them when i was a kid, and bought one once. Then decided to buy another and… Now I’ve got about 50. I try to get one from every place i visit.
I don’t think AVH existed when I left Boston, but I did stop in when I was back in town for various meetings. When I was poor I preferred general used book shops instead of specialty shops, since you get better deals there. Change of Hobbit in Berkeley is incredibly overpriced, for instance.
For books, anyhow, here is how you can distinguish the collector from the reader. The reader looks at the author’s name, and the blurb, and maybe the first few pages. The collector looks at his or her want list, and pays more attention to the publisher’s number or issue than what is inside. At least that is what I do. Don Wollheim numbered DAW books consecutively for a reason.
I have a small collection of Original Production Cells from animation. My pride and joy are two from the original Grinch holiday classic, one of the grinch, one of Max.
For a while a partner and I were making non-violent 3-D games for kids. And so I kinda got into the animation thing.
I also have some from Dilbert and some from the old Raid comercials. And a few other odd ones.
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I’ll buy I don’t collect, but I do play, sometimes.
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I collect Japanese animation (anime) , mainly dubbed versions from TV, since I’m pretty much broke. My current collection is 350 tapes/DVDs (95 movies/series total, most of which are partially or entirely complete), with a good portion of those being 6-hour tapes taped off of TV.
I also collect anime and anime-video-game (or vice-versa) mp3s (4951 right now).
Life? Life… Yeah, I’ve heard of that somewhere. :dubious:
I collect 8-track tapes. I have a collection that’s approaching 200 tapes, in working order. This also means I collect 8 track stereo players. It’s a quirk, and nothing I set out to do on purpose. about 8 years ago, I was just looking for a tuner to play the radio in my room, and the one I snagged from the thrift store had an 8-track player in it. I wondered if it worked, it did. So I’ve been off-handedly collecting cartridges and equipment ever since. I have some MP3s where the source material is 8track. They sound better than you might think.
To a lesser extent, I also collect vinyl. To a greater extent, I collect books (who doesnt?)
I save all my race numbers from runs I’ve been in. On the back I write the date, distance, and my time and rank. They’re pinned to my bulletin board by the bed, along with my few ribbons and medals, and pictures of me running and posing with my race buddies.
I collect pictures of people flipping off the camera. I mostly find them on the web through random image searches like at diddly.com. I have several hundred of them, and am working on a web display area for the collection. It’s a beautiful assortment.
I also have several thousand baseball cards, and lots of obscure old reference books of various utility. Mrs danalan collects teapots, Boyd’s Bears figurines, and salt & pepper shakers.
I collect vintage Pyrex, mostly the brightly colored mixing bowls but also clear if it has a pressed design in it. It’s just about time to start selling off some of mine, because our kitchen is fairly small and I have an entire cabinet devoted to it.
Also short horror story anthologies. I’m gonna write the most boring book ever, and it will be about the short horror story genre, so this isn’t actually collecting…it’s, y’know…research! Yeah, research, that’s it!
And since I got my sewing machine fixed, I am apparently collecting fabrics now. I don’t really even have plans for some of it–I just like to look at it and gloat.
My sister is a jewelry maker, and I covet her collection of swarovski crystal beads. I want to collect them, not to make jewelry from, but just to hoard and play with and look at. I don’t dare get started, though, at least until the kids are old enough to keep out of them. But one day…ooooh, yes…mounds of shiny shimmery bright faceted beads!
My main collection is all things Western Electric. This means I don’t limit myself to phones and also collect all the odds and ends and ephemera. Stuff like advertising flyers for new styles of phones, brochures on why the war effort is preventing you from getting a new phone, silverware from the cafeteria, etc. I’ve even got a chunk of fabric covered in the Western Electric logo, evidently a leftover from making curtains for an office.
Comic Books (only a few hundred, nothing compared to most collectors.)
Anything related to Sam Keith’s The Maxx
Anything related to the D&D setting Ravenloft
Keychains (a lapsed collection. I stopped caring around college)
Magic: The Addiction cards
Elephants. (Not real ones, of course, although that would be cool.)
My Star Wars collection is weird only in that it’s oddly limited, but also oddly vast:
Star Wars Figures (I decided to limit myself to prequel-only and one of each main character from the originals, to avoid going broke. It’s a weird limit, but it works for me.)
Star Wars Beanie Buddies
Star Wars Lego sets
Star Wars PEZ dispensers
Anything with Yoda on it. (9 or 10 different figures in assorted sizes, an electronic talking one, a beanie one, a tiny bust, lego figure, lego sculpture, keychain, poster, cardboard standup, tshirt, PEZ…)
My collecting is done almost solely with an eye to future profit. In the meantime, they’re nice to look at. I have a coin collection, an Alaskan art collection and an Alaskana book collection.
I was finally able to get people to stop giving me coffee mugs and ship captains. If you make the mistake of buying something that catches your eye, every goddamn relative and friend suddenly assumes that you have an overwhelming lust for like items. I had to be fairly blunt about it, then box up all the crap and give/throw it away.
I’m a serial collector. I do one thing for awhile, then it just kind of loses appeal for me and I merely use and/or enjoy the things, rather than beat the bushes or haunt eBay for them. (I spend ungodly amounts of time and money on eBay.)
Sometimes the bug is life-changing, as with my vintage jazz/big band record collection (numbering some 40,000 titles) or my saxophone arsenal. Other times it’s a transitory thing. Subsequently I begin on something else. Almost without exception it’s something dating from the 1920s, '30s, or '40s. For almost a year I had an unaccountable fixation on the giant airplane the Dornier Do X. Before that I was busy researching the pre-commercial era of TV broadcasting, ostensibly for a book I knew I’d never write.
My current kick is assembling wearable World War II officers’ uniforms, so I never have to think about what to wear on Halloween ever again.
Wow, I collect postcards and stamps, too, though am a little more specific.
I collect movie posters on postcards. They’re fun to find, especially in foreign countries, and at usually $1 (or less) each, it’s much cheaper than collecting actual one-sheets. I stopped counting how many I had when I passed 1000.
I also collect stamps, though only film-related ones. At first, I did this because it wasn’t unrealistic to have a comprehensive international collection of all movie-related stamps ever issued. But things have ballooned quite dramatically in the past few years, so I’ve abandoned that effort, and have decided to combine my collections together.
Now, I concentrate on First Day Covers that I create myself (and get postmarked by the USPS) using my postcards (which I find more attractive than most of the caches that dealers deal with). This makes these collectible genuinely one-of-a-kind, especially if I can combine multiple stamp issues together (I have a Charade postcard that has separated FDCs for the Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Henry Mancini issues). I derive a lot of genuine enjoyment out of this, and I comfort my wife in explaining that this is her nest egg, determining the level of care she’ll get when I put her in a home. Also, maintaining this level of specificity means that it’s fairly easy to manage from a cost basis (since stamps don’t cost much, neither do postcards, and not many movie-related stuff comes out anyway).
Shirley Ujest, I’d be happy to trade stamps with you, but it doesn’t sound like anything you have will add to mine in any way. Let me know if I’m wrong, though.
And thanks for the link–I’ll have to check it out.
Oh, I should also mention that I collect all my movie ticket stubs. Numbers in the thousands, I suspect (haven’t counted), I have a big jar I put them in. I also collect movie scores on CD (have a few hundred), but don’t aim for anything definitive–merely stuff that I like.
I also used to collect, as a kid, baseball cards, comic books, bottle caps, and action figures. Haven’t added to any of those collections in years, though I imagine a few things (especially select rookie cards) are quite valuable now.
SURE! I haven’t looked at my purty collection in some time ( kids have a way of ruining the fun and haphazard orgazination of it all. The weasals.) Me email is in my profile.
I also collected movie ticket stubs. Did it for years. I haven’t been inside a theater in probably…since…Shrek 2 came out. Rent mostly. $7.50 a flick now…x4…no frooking way.
Oh, and I have one pen in my floatie pen collection. Those suckers are hard to find.
And I love magnets from interesting places. Even dull places. Versatile, cheap and some other adjective I can’t think of .
I don’t collect, but I do play, sometimes.
Let me know if I’m wrong, though.