The stereotypical collector–whether in a book, film, or on TV–seems to hail from one of the following: Coin Collector, Comic Collector, Record Collector, Baseball Card Collector, or Stamp Collector. In my life, the only one of those I haven’t done is collect baseball cards… but the only collection that didn’t follow me into adulthood is the stamp collection. I’ve still got all the comics from my youth, my vinyl collection has expanded enormously, and I still check my pocket change for wheatstraw pennies, new state quarters, or old nickels. My stamp collection was all but forgotten until my parents discovered an abandoned shoebox of unorganized stamps in a closet. I don’t know what happened to the books I had filled with hinged stamps categorized by country and year. However, as a pack rat, I couldn’t just let these abandoned stamps go to the trash, so I brought them home.

Stamp collecting has been around since the 17th century, as long as stamps have been used as postage. As tiny works of art, stamps benefited from the forgery-resistant fine printing quality reserved for money, but had the condition of being worthless once used. While the mail recipients didn’t need to feel bad about throwing out their stamps, collectors began to hold on to them, trying to obtain versions they’d never seen before and stamps from distant regions. In the 1800s, combined with quicker modes of travel and widespread colonialism, the hobby of stamp collecting grew more common. Mostly it was a fun pastime for children, but professional collectors began to join in the fun. As with other antiques and collectibles, an industry has developed devoted to producing price guides, printing catalogs that identify the rare from the mundane, and helping collectors keep their prized possessions in the highest quality condition as possible.

Today, postage stamp collecting is quite common and is often supported and encouraged by each country’s postal service. Without the hobby of stamp collecting, there would be little incentive for any post office to produce commemorative or creative postage stamps like the Favorite Children’s Book Animal set from earlier this year. Up until a recent remodeling, the main post office here in Fargo had a dedicated “Philatelic Window,” designed to look like a old-world post office window, especially to help collectors add to their cache of stamps.

Like many collections, stamp collecting can be either financially focused or recreationally focused. While it can be encouraging to find a rare and valuable stamp, many collectors focus on one country, type of stamp, or stamp subject matter. The wide variety of images placed on stamps across the world leaves nearly any subject open for collecting on a stamp: comic characters, authors, classic art, or any animal you can imagine have all been represented amongst others. Getting a stamp collection started requires little more than a scrapbook, some stamp hinges, and a pair of tweezers. Cancelled stamps, ones used to pay for a stamp’s transportation, arrive attached to an envelope and require a short bath in warm water to become separated from the paper. Tweezers are used to prevent the skin’s oils from staining the stamp, and hinges allow a stamp to be mounted in a scrapbook with minimal trouble or damage. Pre-printed scrapbooks are available for generalist collectors, and can be quite informative regarding other countries and their own various postage.

A collection can go quite a while relying entirely on the mail that enters the collector’s household, but after a point a collector will need to turn to outside sources for their stamps. Pen-pals are an obvious source for foreign stamps. Trading events are a way to connect with other stamp collectors and get a closer look at a wider variety of stamps. eBay, of course, has a full section for stamp collectors at rather reasonable prices. Because so many people have collected stamps at some point in their lives, entire collections often turn up at auctions and estate sales.

I’m not sure if rediscovering these lost stamps rekindles my interest in a stamp collection, but I did enjoy digging through the tiny colorful bits of paper, remembering that “Magyar” means Hungary and that Karl Marx appeared prominently on German postage. I suppose I can’t let them be tossed back in the shoebox, can I? They may wait until one of our kids shows interest in stamp collecting. As a collection, stamps teach about geography, require little storage space, and do not require difficult skills. In the interest of encouraging children to collect, I can see why philatelic associations have such active children’s features. My interest may not have extended beyond childhood, but the art of collecting stamps had not faded in its appeal and charm.

When I was seven years old, I inherited a beautiful antique piano from my mother’s aunt. I loved that piano. The wood was inlaid with swirls and designs that had faded in different ways over the decades and inside was a yellowed tuner’s label with the date January 6, 1906 and “tuners to the royal family” (or something like that—I’ve forgotten the exact wording) and I wondered if my piano had stood in a London parlor decades before. It locked with an old fashioned skeleton key that I eventually put on a cord and wore as a necklace. I learned how to play on that piano. The keys had an annoying habit of sticking in summer and the piano was perpetually out of tune, but it was mine.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning decades of the twentieth, pianos were very common and most homes that could afford a piano had one. For that reason, there are still many pianos from that era available today and because they are so plentiful they are not particularly valuable. Also, one hundred years ago piano makers were still refining the techniques the used to create the instruments and the majority of pianos made in that era were not of good enough quality that they can still be played today. Player pianos in working order tend to be more valuable because they are harder to find, as are the player piano music rolls to go with them.

As kids who collected, we were out and about, scavenging for another piece to add to our collections. If our treasure was acorns, we were outside searching the ground or climbing the trees to find more. If they were stickers, we did odd jobs and raced with fists full of money to the corner store for a fix. When our collections outgrew one shoebox, drawer or container, we created new methods to store them. As they grew larger, we organized them. When sharing our treasures, we knew when and where we discovered each piece—and the history of the object was as important as the object itself. Oh yes, our collections were literally our pride and joy.

In a world where kids may plant themselves in front of passive entertainment, such as TV or video games, it may be time for parents to get Joe and Sue off the couch and out and about collecting. Even if that means a fishing tackle box full of Barbie shoes, rows of Matchbox cars, or shelves full of rocks—because collecting results in practical lessons.

A child who collects will not squander his allowance on a candy bar when he could buy a new piece for his collection. Earning money, saving money, the value of a dollar, these are practical lessons in simple math and fiscal responsibility that every child should have.

A child who has a collection will naturally become interested in history, willingly do research, and happily build organizational skills. These abilities will strengthen because the child herself has an interest in discovering more about what she collects. She will seek more information about what she collects as well as how to store and care for the prized pieces in her collection.

Support the child’s interests, and you’ll have a child who happily takes the box out from under the bed to proudly display his collection. (That’s just steps away from a child who, out of passion and respect for his collection, keeps his room clean!)

Have a shy child? One with poor self esteem? Or a teenager reluctant to talk with you about anything? Ask her about her collection—but you’d better be sitting down, because the answer will take awhile! Since a collection is a reflection of her own personal tastes, and because she and only she has all the information on when and where items were found, the child becomes the expert who will tell you all about it.

If you’d like to get your child interested in collecting, or interacting with other kid collectors, check out these resources:

The Science Museum of Minnesota has a Collectors’ Corner where kids can bring in natural objects they found and earn points — the points can then be used to trade for other specimens.

The Smithsonian has a Kids Collecting website with lots of information and videos to get ideas on starting collecting, including pop culture collectibles.

Gardening With Kids has info on ways to tie in collecting with gardening.

Pin Fever has a Kids Zone page with lots of info for beginners as well as a list of other kids who want to trade.

To see what other kids are collecting, visit ZuZu’s Kids Collect page—and children can even join the own online exhibit.

My dad was an early adopter of the tape cassette. Audio cassettes (as the past 30 years or so showed) had a good sound quality, were nicely portable, and held one or two albums of music depending on if you could fit one on each side of a 90 minute tape. As such, I didn’t meet an 8-track tape in person until the early 1980s while getting a ride from a friend’s mom. She had several strewn about the front seat of her boat-like 1970s car, one playing Willie Nelson tunes jutting out of a rectangular hole in the middle of the dash. That would be the last time I saw an 8-track up close until college.

8-track tapes grew out of a few earlier tape technologies of the 1950s and 1960s. Reel-to-reel tape was considered an equal to vinyl by many audiophiles, but it proved too fragile for portability. Several different companies worked on a portable version of the reel-to-reel; William Lear (the Learjet mogul) found success by creating the 8-track cartridge.

While these cartridges were rather simple, their operation is quite a feat to behold. Inside the cartridge is one large tape reel, around which the tape is looped and wrapped on top of itself. As the tape is pulled from near the center of the reel, the reel turns and pulls in the tape that had already been fed past the playback head. Friction-reducing coatings on the tape and a light coiling of tape allows the system to operate as smoothly as possible. The tape is pulled past the playback heads by a pinch-roller, half of which is mounted inside the cartridge. Each tape has (as you might guess) 8 tracks, each paired up in to four separate stereo programs. Each program lasted around 15 minutes (it varied depending on how the tracks could be broken up for song length), and ended/started with a small piece of metallic reflective tape. This tape told a sensor to automatically switch tracks, creating an unending loop of audio—something cassettes couldn’t do until much later.

In college, I was offered a treasure-trove of 8-tracks by my grandparents. They had found a box in the basement, and none of my aunts or uncles claimed it, so I accepted it. Most were quite worn, so I learned how to repair and restore 8-tracks by getting these to play. While 8-tracks were relatively simple machines, they often were not manufactured with longevity in mind. Most 8-tracks, even ones still in their cellophane, may need some minor repairs before they can be played.

Most often, the metallic tape strip could weaken, resulting in a broken tape loop. If this happens during playback, the cartridge might have to be opened to recover the end that was ‘sucked in’ by the rotating reel. An excellent replacement for the metallic splice is aluminum tape, often found in the plumbing or painting section of a hardware store. Another common repair is the sponge pressure pad, located in the cartridge and positioned to press the tape against the playback head. Again, the hardware section is the right place to find a fix. Sponge weatherstripping is an excellent replacement, provided it isn’t too firm. If the surface isn’t smooth enough to allow the tape to slide well, a layer of cellophane tape on top can help. Playing a cartridge with a loose splice or otherwise damaged will only damage the cartridge further, so all cartridges should be inspected before playing them.

I, unfortunately, have gone through a number of different 8-track players. Like the cartridges, players aren’t particularly complex, but few were made after the 1970s and are often in significant disrepair. Happily, most are relatively cheap and moderately common. Two of the players I owned were even quadraphonic: quad 8-tracks were considered an improvement even over quad record albums, which had to encode the rear channels onto a stereo track. Quad 8-tracks used four separate tracks to create two front and two rear channels, improving the quality but reducing the length of recorded time by half. Quadraphonic playback decks are recognizably by having four output channels on the back, and an extra ‘arm’ inside which detects a notch present on quad cartridges and automatically switch between stereo and quadraphonic modes.

8-track tapes are much easier to find than players, and rarely cost more than a dollar or two apiece in played condition. Collectors prefer unopened or near-mint cartridges, and rarer ones from the later years of 8-track production. Despite the waning interest in 8-tracks during the late 1970s, they were still manufactured and new recordings were distributed in this format until the late 1980s. Even as CD players were entering the market, some mail order and record club companies were still selling 8-track recordings.

Because 8-tracks aren’t an “invest for your kids’ college tuition” collectible, most of their value is in the fun of tinkering. As with vinyl, numerous recordings from the late 1960s and 1970s are not available on CD, opening up new opportunities for discovering forgotten or overlooked bands. Car collectors looking for genuine period details would be wise to add an 8-track player, often installed under the dash, to their prized vehicles. Fans of 1970s style can find all sorts of players in retro-futuristic forms. The most fun, for adults and children alike, are 8-track recorders. These are most often found in single-unit systems that also included a record player or radio, but I’ve also seen standalone components that can be added to any stereo. Once you acquire a few duplicates or a bunch of ‘blank’ 8-tracks, you could be the proud owner of the only Green Day, Ruben Studdard, or Nickelback 8-tracks in existence.

To find out more, 8-Track Heaven has the most comprehensive information on 8-track tapes, including an excellent section on cartridge repair.

Phil Hale’s painted figures explode from the canvas, but against their will. Caught in awkward mid-motion, it’s more like they’re being shoved and broken as they get forced outwards, angry and stumbling from their reality into ours. It’s like a Tom Waits song in motion; charred, gritty, blind and twisted characters getting together for a ritual that we can barely understand, and this is why I love the man.

Hale is a mysterious figure. Where many modern artists, especially those who dabble as illustrators, have websites and biographies and make themselves as public as possible, he remains an enigma. Even the website which was once live for this release, which seems to be his first personal foray into the world of the digital, was serpentine and hard to decipher, with icons flashing and evading the cursor, more often than not leading you somewhere that you didn’t intend to go, and when you get there, you’re still not entirely certain what it is that you’ve found.

His most recent print release is called ‘mockingbirds/relaxeder‘, published by Donald M. Grant, is a two-book set meant to accompany a recent pair of gallery shows by the same name. Hale has only had two books previous to this, entitled ‘Double Memory‘ (with artist Rick Berry) and ‘Goad‘. The rest of his work, which is prolific, graces comic book covers and magazine articles, but often remains uncollected. The set retails for about 45 dollars, are jacketless and dark green, and are bound to each other by a band of paper. They’re fairly narrow volumes and they don’t explore a very wide variety of Hale’s work, but they’re impressive in what they explore conceptually.

Affixed to the inside back cover of ‘mockingbirds’ on a small foam disc is a CD of music which accompanied the gallery shows, as performed by Golden Phone. Normally, these art book CDs are snooty and abstract compositions without any standalone attractiveness, but the 8 song album is beautiful: an echoey mix of Elysian Fields, Medeski Martin & Wood and Calexico, and worth the price of admission alone.

‘Mockingbirds‘ is a deep exploration into a single image of an old and shirtless man, captured from many angles, many of the images simply titled ‘mockingbirds,’ perhaps a reference to repetition or each image mirroring the previous one. The summation of all of these images, all of them slightly different and from various perspectives, sometimes with added or subtracted details [like the man's head, or an item in the hands], gives the impression of someone walking through a dim room and blinking while reality betrays them. It’s as if Hale snapped a roll of film as he walked from the center of the room and out the door, every exposure on whatever his eyes settled on. It’s vaguely ‘horror movie,’ and completely engrossing when viewed in rapid succession, almost as an animation. There’s plenty of time to go back of inspect each image more carefully. As the series progresses, we enter the more violent and familiar territory of Hale, but the references to the earlier ‘mockingbirds’ works are still revisited.

Relaxeder, the second volume, explores Hale’s sketches and found-object photomontages. His sketches are torn and covered in tape, missing cut-out segments, and all in thick pencil lines. There’s an energy to them, all of them capturing action and motion in broad, general strokes. Hale’s photographs, subsequently, are completely static depictions of objects, which are usually small machines that are completely of his own devising. Disjointed, effectively useless, and really convincing. Perhaps most unnervingly, there’s an image of a severely truncated typewriter that only retains a few keys, cut and reassembled as if nothing’s wrong at all.

The two books comprise a fascinating exploration, and are a great addition to any art book collection. Once things like this sell out, their first editions usually skyrocket in price, so get them while they’re more common. Check out Allen Spiegel Fine Arts for more info and ordering information.