If You Unwrap it, the Value Goes Down

I am going to do my part to get things going again, because even if I'm travelling I still need things to read on here.

A couple days ago, I bought two Latin American magazines even though I barely know Spanish. Since magazines are my Thing, I always get a local magazine whenever I travel out of the country to see how they do things, and it has grown into a collection of souvenirs rather than just a research tool. If I know someone who's travelling somewhere I haven't been and I think a present could be in the cards, I always request a magazine from them. My three favorites are the one I got in Israel and the one my aunt got me from Japan because of the different alphabets. I also really like the cool kid alternative magazine I got in Paris that I wish I could find here.

Focus: What do you collect? What out of your collection(s) is your prized possession? Pictures would help keep it snazzy.

Besides the international magazines, I also collect owl statues and toy robots (not Toy Robots, but robot toys) and I have an impressive author autograph collection that has been growing since I was little. My favorite autographs are Jonathon Safron Foer,the staff of The Daily Show for Earth, and Sloane Crossley.

 

The last time I got my baseball card collection looked at by my uncle (who use to run a shop) he said the collection was worth well over a thousand dollars. I can only imagine how much it has appreciated since then...

 

I collect fortunes from cookies. I also collect bottle caps, magazine clippings to make collages, and other random things. I have a shoe box of random shit.

 

Not much, if at all.

Unless you have cards from before the mid 70's (truthfully, it's more like late 60's), chances are your beloved collection has lost money since about 2000.

I have something around 18,000 cards, which I cataloged on Beckett (it costs per month now, so I no longer use it), but they would keep up with market prices for cards, always showing you what your collection is worth. I've lost over $2300 since abut 2002, probably more but I haven't even bothered to look.

It's worth paying for it once just to see what you're actually sitting on. Someone in a shop can tell you that a card is worth $40 but that's with their profit built in, not a true indicator if there's three of the same card for sale on eBay for $20.

 

Honestly, I thought they were worth next to nothing at this point, shit even if they only lost half their value I'd be happy. I might use that though just to see what I can get before they become completely worthless.

 

I cataloged almost all of my cards too. I have just over 8000 it looks like. I didn't know you have to pay for Organize feature now until I just went to check up on it. I'm going to get my top 10 or 15 cards graded so they're actually worth something should I try to sell them at some point.

 

I collect whatever happens to be produced locally. When I went to Bayfield, WI this past year for the Apple Festival I left with a crate of apple wine. When I visited the Outer Banks in North Carolina I came home with a Hatteras Hammock. I drove to Nebraska last year for a Cornhuskers game, and returned with an appreciation for Big 12 (now Big 10) football. From Berlin in 2006 I brought home a bunch of World Cup swag.

If this TiB vacation happens in New Orleans, I'm betting that I'll return to MN with chlamydia.

 

I have two small collections. One is antique tools that date back to the 1600's, the other is Coca-Cola memorabilia. I haven't really added anything to them in years, but I still like them I keep them well kept. Some of the tools are worth hundered of dollars apiece, and I always debate on selling some or letting the value climb slowly.

I also have my sports card and comic collection buried in mothballs at my folks' house. It's probably worth quite a bit, it has rookie cards for Emmit Smith, Ken Griffey Jr., Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, Cam Neely, Mario Lemieux and Steve Yzerman. I don't have it at my house because I know that the day I bring them here it will burn down.

 

I hate collecting. I hate clutter. Every year I go through my possessions and throw out anything that seems superfluous because I can't stand the thought of having these weird things tie me down.

But the one thing I have a terrible time getting rid of are my books. I have an absurd amount of books and I can't bear the thought of parting with any of them. I even bought a Nook to ease my retarded desire to continuously buy books and shove them in my book room (not quite a library, but so close...), and it didn't work. I get such a wonderful rush picking out the perfect book from the bookstore and bringing it home and putting it in the "To Read" pile.

I would probably save a ton of money if I just went to the actual library.

 

I don't really collect anything since I hate clutter, but I do like souvenirs of places I've visited. I figured the simplest and cheapest, but still meaningful, souvenir would be to hold on the the metrocard/train ticket of all the places I've traveled to. It's a nice little reminder.

 

I've just started collecting the wristbands of music festivals I attend. I have two, so it's really not much of a collection.

 

I collect comic books. I started when I was 8, as something to read, which lead me to reading novels. My parents were happy I was reading, so they didn't care what it is. It's morphed from tupperwear container on maybe 30 comics, to about 60+ long boxes of comics totaling over 18 000.

It's been a hobby ever since, except for maybe 6 months in grade 9 when I first started dating girls, but then I realized I could do both. It has been very, very strange to watch comics be a social stigma, to the very popular, successful franchises the movies have made them.

In the last year, I've bought 4 comics that would be some of the coolest in my collect. I got the X-Men 1, and Daredevil 1, the first appearances of both, from the early 60's. They are in surprisingly good condition considering they are printed on newsprint and found in a guys grandfathers attic after he passed away.

I also have 2 recalled comics from the last 10 years, that were fairly hard to find. 1 that features Superman as a baby being microwaved. The other was a League of Extraordinary Gentleman comic that had an real historical advertisement for a "Marvel Douche" that DC recalled due to worry over Marvel getting upset over it.

 

I hate having extraneous things laying around, although I'm messy as shit. I hate accumulating things that I don't use. I never even bought a yearbook when I was in highschool (although now with facebook and other social networking, yearbooks seem extraneous).

edit: Originally wrote "yearbooks seem superfluous," submitted, then realized "superfluous" was in the quote already. Dammit Roxanne.

 

Little League shirts. I've been able to wear the same size shirt as my son since he was 5, so I've got quite a few. They're always pretty oversized, so I steal them after the season.
Other than that, I hate clutter. I don't collect anything because I hate moving anything.

 

I collect setlists from concerts I've been to. Currently, I've got 29 setlists from 8 different bands (16 from moe., 7 from Jimkata, 3 from O.A.R., 1 from Lynch, 1 from Mao Say Fun, and 1 from Ultraviolet Hippopotamus). As for other music memorabilia, I have 4 drumsticks from the band moe., most of my ticket stubs from all the shows I've been to, a few tour posters, 5 festival wristbands, a fan-made medal from the first festival I attended, and a bunch of other stuff like laminates, picks, stickers, etc.

My prized posession out of all of that would have to be a picture of Lewis Black and I. I worked security at his show when he played at my college a few years back, we all got a meet-n-greet with him after the show. He's shorter than I expected. Then and again, I'm 6' 4"

 

Somewhat related: my boss owns the only anime store in Dallas. He gets the freaks, geeks, and everything in between.
His store has every type of obscure Japanese piece of whatever in it...and he wants to punch babies when someone walks in And says "nice collection mannnnnnn".

Also I figured out that I do collect something. ...makeup. I inventoried my stash...I could almost pay off my car.

 

Books. Lovely, moldering books. I like new books. Their smell, their pages under my fingertips, their weight of words and weight of lift. I like old books that stink like water damage, each page stained with years of coffee stains and cheeto fingerprints. I like used books that people have highlighted and abused, their musings in the margins. Yes, I feel horribly pretentious having them on display, but goddamn a library is a wonderful conversation piece. Nothing is more satisfying than someone flipping through them and finding some nugget of truth. It's also funny when someone mentions a research paper they're doing and I can say, "Well let me bring you over a few things to help, I've got a section on ----." Yeah, ladies. I've got sections for days.

It started with a copy of Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters, after Fight Club came out in theaters. Then American Psycho by Ellis. That morphed into everything from Hemingway to Will Chris Baer and Dan Brown, to religious history, art, genetics, and psychology. Also, no library is complete without a copy of Lemmy's autobiography.

I spend hours drifting through Amazon.com, making lists, buying old penny books with mustard pages and broken spines. Couple years ago I started getting a lot of stuff from the libraries just because it's getting disappointing to spend coin on a crappy story. A lot of them are only good for one read. I've been weeding out some undesirables lately. Probably still have in the neighborhood of at least 300, plus another 300 of my dad's. Next step is to be able to afford antique editions. Especially pre-Victorian medical tomes with gnarly illustrations.

My ideal death would be at the ripe age of 120, after a bourbon, a book, and a brunette, to hear the floorboards creaking then explode in an avalanche of books that crush me instantly.

 

As others have said, books. Although I move so often that my collection has taken quite the hit. I probably only have something like 50 - 60 books now. I am trying to build it back up.

My sister on the other hand is in the middle of moving right now, and she has been bitching about her 500 plus books, and the moving/storing there of.

My Magic the Gathering collection however is absurd. I have well over 40,000 cards. Hell I might be up to 50,000 these days. The really sad thing is, other than the rares, and uncommons, most of my cards will sit in their gigantic card boxes and fester until I have to find ONE FUCKING CARD from the miasma of lost things that is my collection. Then there will be hours of cussing and bitching while I try to find said card. Then the process gets reversed while I try to put it all away.