“It began with postage stamps. I had a letter from a friend of mine who had gone out to South Africa. The letter had three cornered stamp on it, and I thought as soon as I looked at it, “That’s the thing! Stamp collecting! I’ll devote my life to it!”
“On Collecting Things” from “Literary Lapses” by Stephen Leacock.
===========================================
I like the elite sound of being called “a collector”.
My friend Colin describes himself as an art collector. He has a collection of rock band posters from the 1970s which he keeps at the back of his wardrobe. He does this because his wife doesn’t want provocative poses of Tina Turner displayed anywhere in the house. Colin notes ruefully that she didn’t object when she had dinner with him in his Tina Turner decorated flat before they were married.
Just goes to show you what topics should be covered in pre-marriage counselling courses.
Colin is convinced that in a few decades the posters will be worth a fortune. This depends on the appetite of his household silverfish.
Colin is also a collector of vintage cars. It’s a collection of one. He has a 1965 Mini Cooper S in his garage, which he bought in 1988, intending to restore it. He is convinced it will be worth a fortune when it is restored. He just hasn’t got around to it yet. His wife suggested selling the car, one part at a time. Grudgingly Colin advertised various parts on an internet auction site but found that the only part anyone wanted was the “Cooper S” badge. Apparently people wanted to put it on their plain old Mini 850 to impress their friends. No one was interested in buying the Cooper S engine because, as 1960s car fanciers know, old Minis were designed with the distributor and other electrical components just behind the front grille and so they would stop dead if you drove the car through a puddle.
Another fellow I know, Wally, bought an old ex-army jeep to drive around the farm. Then Jack, one of his mates, suggested he start a collection. Jack knew where Wally could buy a few more ex-army vehicles cheap. Jack knew collectors who had to give up their collection of war toys for big boys due to new local government laws. These laws prohibited parking weapons of war in the driveway. Wally started buying up armoured personnel carriers, army dispatch rider motorbikes and eventually Centurion tanks.
He had to build bigger and bigger sheds to house them. Finally he decided to turn his collection into a moneymaking concern. With a few hand-painted signs he started “Wally’s World War Weapons Warehouse” and charged tourists five dollars each to clamber over his jeeps, tanks and bikes.
Unfortunately he lived 20 km from the nearest town on a dirt road. So his hoped-for cash bonanza from “Wally’s World” was about as impressive as the income from his grandson’s fruit stall out the front of the farm. Wally took down the sign and let the chickens take over the “Wally’s World” sheds. They quite liked it there, roosting in the ammunition magazine of the Centurion tank and in the sidecar of the dispatch riders’ motorbikes.
In fact the chooks were so happy they laid bigger eggs than ever before and Wally sold the eggs as “free firing range eggs” and did quite well in the end.
Another friend, Gordon, collected newspapers. He insistently disagreed with the old adage “Today’s headline, tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper”. For Gordon, newspapers were precious records of the past containing valuable lessons for the future.
How else could he work out the cost of an Abba LP as the percentage of the average weekly wage in 1974?
How else could he list the visionary initiatives of his chosen political party over a 40 year period without his 40 year collection of daily newspapers?
How else could he get evidence for his pet theory on the impact of average monthly rainfall on the stock market index?
He regarded his newspapers as original source documents as valuable to a student of history as Winston Churchill’s war diaries or President Kennedy’s shopping list from 1962.
Unfortunately Gordon died after being buried by the only “newspaper avalanche” ever recorded. He was trying to retrieve the first reported reference to Margaret Thatcher as “the Iron Lady”. The newspaper mountain collapsed and he was hit on the head by an iron weight he used to put on top of each pile to keep them stable. But he died as a direct result of doing what he loved best: collecting.
-Geoff Milton
