As discussed, I’m a huge history nerd. To make matters ‘worse’ I am also one of those parents who prefers that kids not only learn but seek knowledge. I see collecting as one way to instill such passion in our kids (and adults too). Sure, our kids are called ‘weird’ — apparently for just not falling far enough from their weird-parent-trees. (Thanks, Wes Cowan!) But in this age of video games and passive entertainment, I’m thrilled to produce geeks & nerds.

However, instilling such passion in your children is work. It means you have to make the time, be it at home, the thrift store, or right there on the auction floor, to educate your kids… Maybe push them a little bit too. And it means you need to look past a lot of mainstream stuff (i.e. popular toys) to find gifts for your children which will delight as well as continue to quench their nerdy curiosities. That’s not always easy to do. And it’s even more difficult to find something that you can collect together.

So far we’ve bonded over games, vintage vinyl, books, and History Detectives. But there are less ‘new’ items which seem to meet all my (admittedly persnickety) needs. The Noah’s Pals animals are neat, helping with those environmental lessons, but what about history?

Historical Plush Beanie Collectible Figures

Enter the Famous Be’an Collectibles.

Made by Creation Station LLC, Famous Be’an® Collectibles are plush ‘bean stuffed’ toys like Beanie Babies — however, Famous Be’ans are famous historical beings.

Each historical figure is dressed in their appropriate period attire and includes a hang tag with an original colorful illustration and accurate historical information — in poetic verse and prose, to pique interest (we all hope!).

You’ve got your presidents, like Lincoln and JFK, and their wives, such as Mary Todd Lincoln and Jacqueline Kennedy; but there are so many other historical figures and legends too. Activists & authors, explorers & entrepreneurs, inventors and scientists, outlaws & musicians — even animals.

Plush President Lincoln & Other Famous Be'an Collectibles

Standing in front of their booth at the recent museum conference, I was giddy. So many cool plush toys — and so many possibilities for collecting with my kids!

Aside from just being cool history themed things to collect, there are many other reasons why adults will enjoy collecting Famous Be’ans with children:

• There’s a wide variety of historical figures to choose from.
• Because these collectibles are being made today, kids can put their favorite Famous Be’an on holiday lists for Santa and on birthday lists for extended family members.
• And the familiar/understandable topics means people know what the heck the kids are talking about — which means adults can more easily find and purchase the gifts as well as have actual conversations with the children about their collection. (And isn’t that part of what both collecting and gift giving are about?)

Socks The Cat As Famous Be'an

You (or grandma!) can even sign up for the Famous Be’an® Collectible of the Month Club and have a new plush collectible come to your home every month. The company allows you to specify particular areas of interest (Civil War, Native American, etc.) and if you send them a list of which Famous Be’ans you already own, they’ll make sure not to send you duplicates.

For all this ease, Famous Be’ans are real collectibles. Figures will be retired — in fact, some already are! This adds to the thrill of the hunt as you try to find ‘who’ you can while they are available — then search the secondary market for those you have missed.

The company also offers Famous Be’an bookmarks and collecting accessories, such as display cases and display stands. (And if you’re a teacher, there are even Famous Be’an lesson plan books.)

To add to the fun, there are even exclusive designs sold as souvenirs and fundraisers to museums and other organizations. That means you & your family can enjoy discovering new historical figures when you travel to historic sites and exhibits — like Socks the Cat at the Bill Clinton Museum. Now you can get the kids excited about ‘another family car trip’ *wink*

Museum Souvenir Historical Figure Plush Toys

(While some of the exclusives are listed on the website, other gems like Socks and the Headless Horseman shown here are not. Contact Creation Station for a complete list of Famous Be’ans and locations.)

Mom, Dad, hubby… anyone who knows me, if you’re reading this I’ve simply got to add Susan B. Anthony and Rosie the Riveter to my ‘feminist’ collection. Belle Starr too.

And then there’s the kids… Hunter will want Abe Lincoln, Destiny will want Blackbeard, and Allie will want Seaman the dog.

OK, I’m pretty sure that between the kids and I, we want them all. They are just too-too cool.

Sooner or later it had to happen.  I’ve been flirting with the idea of altered art for quite sometime, toying with moving past the concept and coveting into the actual doing. The recent May/June issue of Fine Books & Collections, featuring Brian Dettmer as “The Cut-Up Artist”, was the final straw on this camel’s back.  I don’t know that I’d ever be able to take an X-ACTO to the body of a book and perform the surgery Dettmer does, but I have to start somewhere…

This past weekend I took the plunge.  But not alone. Like ‘misery’, the insecure like company; so it was easy to take a rainy Saturday and turn it into a family project day.

First things first, we needed to make sure the kids (ages 8 & 12) understood that altered art projects are limited to materials predesignated to such acts.

As book & ephemera collectors, neither Derek nor I wished to have kids yanking works off our shelves or plucking items from boxes as art supplies.  So we decided that the best thing to do was to head to a local thrift store and have us all purchase items specifically for this purpose.  This way each item would be checked and OK’d by us before any harm could befall it.

We proceeded to do as we always do, giving the kids a large (nearly lecture-sized) over-view of the day’s projects.  We began by showing them the Fine Books & Collections issue along with Derek’s Pennsylvania Report Scrapbook and telling them that we were going to create new books from old ones — blah, blah, blah.  (I say that because that’s about all they really heard anyway, busy as they were flipping through the publications we gave them.)

Having sold them on the idea, we headed out for supplies.

With a budget of $5 per person, we each of selected a large hardcover book (mainly modern book club editions in non-pristine conditions, but with a sound-enough overall character to hold our as-yet-to-be-created works), a few magazines (circa late 90’s to early this century), and some children’s books (library discards in moderate condition and other non-valuable titles).

Then it was time to return home and set-up the creation zone. I protected our 100+ year old table by covering it with a vinyl holiday tablecloth, spread the books and magazines out on the top, passed out scissors & glue, and even brought out watercolors, colored pencils, crayons and other craft supplies. Everyone eagerly began to pour through the magazines and books.

And then, one by one, we each stopped to receive or offer reassurance.

“Can I really cut out of this book?” Hunter asked.  (Destiny said nothing, but she was holding her breath, awaiting the answer.)  “Yes, that’s the idea,” I said.  “OK…” he replied with arched eyebrows & a tone that indicated I might have ‘lost it’ & that we all might regret this in a few minutes.  “It’s alright to cut these things up, that’s what we got them for,” Derek said.

Then, a few minutes later, “What are we doing exactly? I mean, can I make it funny?” Hunter asked. “You can make it anything you want — funny, scary, whatever,” I said.  “Best day ever!” was his reply.

But he still hadn’t taken a scissor to anything yet.

It took a few more reassuring rounds of such Q & A before the cutting began.  Good to know the kids really do respect books and paper!

Eventually everyone but me was cutting.

I lifted my scissors… took them near the page… and felt a wave of dizziness hit me.  “Is it hot in here?” I asked, “I think I may pass-out.”  Evey one laughed; but I was serious.  I turned up the air conditioning and then returned to make my first cut.  I didn’t pass-out. I continued, growing in confidence.

Then Derek began to rip the binding in one of the hardcover books he was going to take images from.

I thought I would die from my heart beating in my chest like that.

Again every one laughed at my expense, and for a while there was a bit of competition to see who could make me cringe the most; but eventually we just all settled down into our individual work.

We learned that selecting things to cut-out is easier than arranging them — and that the books will take a long time to fill.  And we reaffirmed that while we all have different styles, interests & approaches, we all enjoy sharing the experience of creating as a group, laughing and calling out, “Hey, look at this!” so that everyone would look at what we made.

Hunter, a typical boy, is mixing cars and sports for his funny book.

Destiny, our pre-teen rocker, is focusing on the photos of rock icons with some “goth” mixed in to make a “dark” book.

Derek selects text passages from Green Grass of Wyoming by Mary O’Hara (People’s Book Club edition), illustrates them with his own art, and is creating his own altered art story book, Dinosaurs of Wyoming.

Me?  I still am not sure what I’m doing… Slow to start, I guess I’m just making it piece by piece, page by page. Each piece has a title and is a work unto itself.  This is Sailor Iris. (Apparently I had little imagination left over for naming that one.)

I did learn that my book wasn’t large enough for the pieces I was creating.  So I had to head to our boxes and find a larger tome.  I selected a 1943 copy of Outlines Of Internal Medicine by C.J. Watson; of no real collector value & written in, but with a sound enough binding & large enough pages to hold my works.

So far, I have to credit the following works for my altered art: Children’s Guide To Knowledge (Parents’ Magazine Press, 70’s), Indy & Mr. Lincoln (by Natalia M. Belting, illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher, 1960), Scuttle The Stowaway Mouse (by Jean & Nancy Soule, pictures by Barbara Remington, 1969), Smithsonian Magazine, and — believe it or not! — that issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine.  (There’s double irony in that for sure, because we save all our back issues of that magazine.)

And with my love of old illustrations, I am toying with scanning in pages I like from more valuable books & papers & using my printer to make paper I can cut-up.  Is that fair to do?  I think so.  If you are allowed to add ink-stamps and whatnot, why not new printed copies of the old illustrations? It certainly is more fair to the old items of value anyway.  And that’s the only way I can make peace with altered arts.

And I have.

So much so, that should Barbara Young (owner of The Old Book Shop, who wrote a letter to the editor complaining about Fine Books & Collections feature article) or another similarly upset bibliophile contact me, I am prepared to defend myself.  I know what I’m doing — at least as far as what not to destroy.

And I love, love, love doing this!

I’m certainly not ready to sell my works at handcrafted fairs or even online outlets. Yet.  First I’d have to get over loving them like my babies (something which was eventually done during my charcoal sketch years, so it is possible).  And, second, I’d have to get better at it. Practice should help with both those things. And now that the table is covered with all this stuff, the temptation to fritter away the hours in artistic pursuit seems more than probable…

So if you’re looking for me, I’ll be at my dining room table, cutting & pasting, coloring and arranging, and making altered art like a crazy person.

(You can check up on my progress by keeping an eye on my altered art collection.)

We were on vacation last week, in Florida. In Tampa, to be exact. Along with Disney, we did several other tourist things, which got me thinking about souvenir albums — you know, those old books with construction paper pages and all sorts of postcards and paper glued into them along with hand written notes on what they did and thought… The ones that force you to page through them at the estate sale so long that you have to buy them so you can take them home and really read them. And in doing so you experience the trips taken by persons long gone, to attractions (if not actual places) which may also be long gone… But in those faded pages the spirit(s) still live.

I get goosebumps just thinking about those old scrapbooks.

I wanted the kids to make such scrapbooks, but they had no interest in it. They never really have. Nothing short of forcing them would make it happen, and vacation memories at gun-point isn’t exactly the sort of charm I was going for.

If they wouldn’t do it for me, they certainly had no interest in doing it for some future collector. And that made me a little sad. At first.

I wondered if we just weren’t making vacations good enough — or at least “like they used to,” but then something happened…

In our condo’s packet of stuff to see and do, I found a brochure for Tampa Bay Ghost Tours. Boasting “All The Best Haunts”, I called and made reservations for the whole crew, including the kids (ages 7 through 18), without asking any real questions. I didn’t ask what the tours were, how long it lasted, or anything that (apparently) sane people ask. I just thought we’d all enjoy it and booked a date.

Now perhaps I should preface all of this by saying that the kids are, among many things, into ghosts.

Along with having hysterically historical parents (both in terms of our ages and our love of history), they are themselves imaginative as well as scientific in their approach to such things as ghosts. (Our household not only watches History Detectives & MythBusters, but Ghost Hunters too).

And it should be noted that one of the favorite Disney attractions was the Haunted Mansion. It was such a favorite, my personal souvenir from Disney was the book, The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies; certain to be a favorite for it’s ghost theme as well as (especially by the eldest) its information on theatrical effects. Oh, and we’ve officially got at least one goth kid. :sigh:

So while I may not have known much about the Tampa Bay Ghost Tours, I did — and do — know a lot about our kids. So I felt confident booking the evening walking tour along the boardwalk at John’s Pass, called the Maritime Mysteries & Pirates of the Pass tour.

The tour itself was everything I could have asked for — and so much more.

It was over an hour of ghost stories, told to us against the backdrop of the beautiful boardwalk at sunset. The stories or legends are of real people who lived in or around John’s Pass, documented and researched by Deborah Frethem who has authored Ghost Stories of St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Pinellas County: Tales From a Haunted Peninsula — a book available in the tour’s gift shop.

Books I eventually purchased.

Yes, “books” — because, for reasons I shall soon explain, each of the kids and myself, needed a copy.

You see, the tour was very cool, but what really made the tour so neat was our tour guide, Quartermaster Moe.

A large, physically imposing man dressed as a pirate (but not in an over-the-top way), his deep voice and mesmerizing storytelling had all three of the children, as well as we adults, spellbound. I can’t really say enough about Quartermaster Moe without further embarrassment of my family or the Quartermaster himself, but will say that Tampa Bay Ghost Tours has a goldmine in that pirate.

He so fascinated the children that when we returned to John’s Pass to purchase books the next day (the gift shop being closed by the time the tour ended), that I had an idea… I’d ask if we could get the quartermaster to sign our books. I wasn’t sure if this would be possible that day, but driving there I figured I could shoo the children to grandma for a few minutes and sneak into the gift shop and ask. Even if it meant having the books sent to us via mail, I imagined how happy each child would be… But when we arrived at the shop, who awaited us outside? Quartermaster Moe!

The kids were falling all over themselves at the sight of him when I asked him if he’d mind signing our copies of the book. He was surprised and said he’d never been “honored” with such a request before, but he’d happily do it — and shouldn’t we have photos of that too? At which time one of the other ghost tour guides offered to take a group photo of us all.

Well, long-story-short, he signed all three kids books and my own copy (because the kids wouldn’t have it any other way) and that, my friends, was the high-light of the day if not the trip. Girls clutched the books like they were pirate booty and even the seven year old boy who normally cannot be bothered with books outside of school sat down to read it!

From a collector’s standpoint, Quartermaster Moe’s signature may have no value — but to our family it sure does. In those bits of ink, the spirit of our family and our vacation are collected. Just like those old scrapbooks. Even if it is something a future collector would scratch his head over…

For unless this article makes Quartermaster Moe famous or something, researching that name will be rather difficult.

And that makes me rethink every book I own, ever seen, which has an unknown or seemingly unrelated inscription… Who might that person be/have been and what secrets does it hold?

It wasn’t until later that I noticed the books had also been signed by the author. Then I felt a twinge of guilt. I was marveling at what will likely be “meaningless” or intrinsic personal value of Moe’s signature and oblivious to what is perhaps the autograph with monetary value.

But then I realized (or at least hope) that Frethem would get our family’s love of such quintessence — she, after all, spent a great deal of time researching and writing about similarly powerful but oft unseen mysteries: ghosts.

Her collection of ghosts, or at least their stories, is a preservation of more than History with a capital ‘H’, but the specters of the past which are as incoherent yet potent as any other memory. And collecting them has value.

Ever since our daughters were toddlers and old enough to ask “would you take less for this?” they’ve been going with us to yard sales! There were times when they would grumble because it was too early in the morning, or they wanted to be out playing. But we always promised it would just be for a few hours and they would be back home soon! And we usually gave them a little pocket money so they could find a treasure or two.

There are some down-sides to taking kids to sales. The obvious one, of course, is the possibility of breakage. But our girls were told from little on – eyes are for looking, don’t use your hands until an adult gives you the nod. They were very cautious and not one thing was ever broken. Another down-side is that they can ask “are you going to keep that, mama, or sell it?” After a few times, and seeing the disdain on our faces, they realized that this was not appropriate. They were told to ask that question ONLY when we were in the car – and they listened. There is a really big up-side though. And that is that people love little kids and think it is just charming when they have a delightful 5 year old ask for a ‘bargain price.’ They almost always comply! In fact, they got quite a few things for free, just because of the ‘cute factor.’ We also think it is important that they learn the value of items and they realize items that are chipped, dinged or otherwise damaged, have a much lower worth!

Our oldest granddaughter has also been ‘put to work’ in hunting for antiques and collectibles. She has turned out to be quite a good luck charm! We were at a garage sale one summer and she turned to me and said “you like cows, don’t you grandma?” She handed me a tablecloth with Elsie the Cow from Borden’s. It was in wonderful condition and priced very low. (We made a profit of over $30 on that one.) Another time, after buying numerous items at a sale, we got into the car. She looked at me and said “did you see them pack up that horse statue?” Well, No, I did not – and ran back to find it still on the check-out table! Whew!

She also has very ‘young eyes’ and even with a magnifier at the ready, I don’t’ see every boo-boo. But she does, and readily points it out to me. We have tried to instill the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ in her too by having her buy several items and then listing them on ebay. She enjoys watching the price escalate! After it sells, we calculate the price of the item, deduct the listing fees and selling fees, and come up with a ‘net.’ She has made some spending money that way! But we have also required that she help pack it up and go to the post office to ship it off. That way, she sees the full-circle and realizes it is not always easy. Especially when only one of the three things she listed sells, and the two remaining have fees to be paid.
There are times when we find an item that she really likes. She asks the questions “keep or sell” when in the car (as she was taught) and is disappointed when it is a for-profit piece. We explain that we never sell anything that has meaning to us such as a gift from our children or grandchildren, or something passed down from family members. And there are times when we keep things on a ‘temporary basis’; displaying it for a while, then when a new-improved item is found, we can sell the older one off. Sort of an ‘up-grade’ system. She has accepted that and knows we cannot keep everything we find!

So, don’t be afraid to teach your children at a young age about the value of things, the thrill of the hunt and the need to be respectful at sales. While many of the folks that hold these are simply ‘cleaning house’ and don’t care who gets it and what they do with it, it is important that you let them feel good about their sale. You can always ‘squeal with delight’ later.

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