Speaking About Collecting
Ok, so I promised to talk about all the stuff that I’m interested in. None of this stuff is actually important, but I find it to be fun. It seems we are always looking for something to distract us from the real world. I guess there’s some nostalgia involved, too.
My sister once said that I don’t simply like things, I go all in. She’s right. If I get latched onto a subject, I have to learn all about it. The good thing is the learning is the fun part. I have become an expert on some of these. Usually it’s because the time I have spent investigating things with my fellow fans. Of course reading is always involved as well. These topics are typically things I would read about for fun anyway.
So, what’s my top interest? Most people know me as a Star Trek or Star Wars fan. With both of these fandoms, I was a round since the start. People also know me as a Comic Book collector/seller. Like most people I’ve read comics since I was little, but amazingly it’s when I got to Junior High that I became a fan of reading and collecting them.
That being said, I think the one thing all of these topics and the others that I’ll talk about have in common is Collecting. If you take a look around our house, it will become pretty clear. Starting with my office downstairs and continuing to most of the upstairs. When we moved into our new house 5 years ago my wife said you can have most of the upstairs so long as my “stuff” didn’t migrate its way to the living room or even our bedroom.
My wife is very patient with me and my collecting. In our last house, it was her idea to get a custom cabinet built to house my comic collection. We had a local closet company design and build bookcases with lucite front panels to house my more than 20,000 comic collection. Each of three drawers in each cabinet slide out for easy access to the collection.
We moved this contraption with us to our current home. It’s a great way to store and have my collection easily accessible. The rest of my collections are housed in shelves or bookshelves throughout the top floor. Somewhere along the line, I learned to save the boxes or other packaging for my collectibles. This seems like a great plan if I plan to resell some of these things. The hidden benefit is that oftentimes it’s the best way to stack and display these items
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I’ve included some random photos to give you an idea about “The Collection”. Next time out I’ll start by talking about specific collections starting with Star Trek, which has been the longest obsession of my life.
