Collecting: _______Fill In The Blank

Antique Organ

Being an engineering type, my collections are practical, antique tool makers gages, not capable of holding today’s manufacturing tolerances, cameras that require film that’s impossible to find, and depression glass ice buckets, too precious to use when having guests over.

I don’t consider the glass door knobs I’ve gathered and still must install as added decoration on our interior doors to be a collection. Nor can you describe the stained glass windows purchased at various garage sales and antique stores now displayed in several rooms in our home a collection. That’s because each was selected both for their aesthetics and for their physical dimensions as they had to fit into the area we had for them.

But while my collections are logical and Wifey’s come close to being reasonable, I often find zero logic in what others collect. Making that confession, I stand the risk of hearing back from other passionate people with obscure, offbeat possessions they have stacked neatly on shelves or piled high in every nook and cranny of their hut.

And who needs to collect auto door lock buttons from 1950s model American cars, trying to acquire all the colors available those years?   And how do you display hog watering troughs?    Does anyone serve guests on restaurant ware dishes?    Can you explain someone’s desire to accumulate airline barf bags?

If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would have been skeptical of anyone collecting bathtubs but there they sat in front of a farm house about eight claw foots in a row.

I even have trouble understanding barb wire collectors, but it might be a bias based on all the scratches I have suffered just handling that stuff.

Who needs more than one, maybe two, ice buckets? OH WAIT, that’s my collection. DAH.

And who feeds these fervent collectors? “Guilty as Charged.” I do buy and resell any and all of the most obscure and odd items I can find and you can bet some person has a desire for those very items. (Hopefully two collectors looking at our Ebay site at the same time.)

Now if you need to fill in the blank with your own oddity, you can be sure you’re not alone. If it can be seen or touched, it is in someone’s collection.

Good Hunting on your own quest.