Collecting & Investing: Not Just Dollars and Cents

When my uncle died many years ago,
my aunt was going through his things to give to me. As she handed me his
binoculars he used at the horse racing track, I asked, “Don’t you want to keep
Uncle Joe’s binoculars?”

She replied, “They are only ‘things’ now.”

My uncle also had a nice collection of race horse figures and art. The
collection she kept and rightly so. An accumulation of “things” represents a
different side of a person than does collecting. Just as a museum represents the
public side of cultural history, collecting represents the private side of that
same continuum.

People collect to preserve an understanding of the past
that they have become comfortable with. As a child, I had both a “Fanner 50”
Double Holster gun set with ammunition belt and also a “Willie Mays Hartland”
that I got at Candlestick Park, San Francisco when I was there with my family in
1962. The guns are gone but not forgotten, but I still have the Hartland and I
think Willie Mays is the best all around baseball player ever (although Roberto
Clemente is a close second).

Many people are collectors but don’t really
know it. Other people think collectors are people who only possess items that
represent their childhood and that certainly does have a lot to do with a grown
person still possessing a plastic figure from 43 years ago! Surely toys that
were remembered as an influence and were not kept become the coveted collector
item of today. Some person, character or event that sparked us to appreciate
this life just a little bit more certainly warrants our cataloged remembrance.

Some people, even so called experts, have postulated that characters,
persons or events from more than a generation ago, no longer have relevance.
Quite the opposite, I suggest, when I see my young grandchildren collecting
postcards from the 1920s and autographs of people they only heard of in stories
and lore.

My wife and I are now very interested in collecting jewelry and
furniture. Again, they represent our shared interest in periods of time and
what those periods represent to each one of us and as a couple. As much as
collecting can be defined as an individual thing, to me, it represents a
connection with society as a whole and what that connection means to the
cultural continuum. Every collector has made a commitment to that cultural
continuum by cataloging their influences to be shared and evaluated by society
as a whole.

Collecting for many may not be so esoteric, but no longer is
the collector typically identified as a person who looks as if they slept in
their van for the weekend just so they can buy a bargain at 5 o’clock in the
morning at some folding table setup from some unsuspecting novice
vendor.

Some may suggest that collecting is a competition between
individuals who are just out for the best price on a boxed mint piece. Whether
it is Depression glass or a Batman Playset, it is the preservation of the
continuum that is important here. Preservationists unite! We are the amateur
historians of our time.

What do you think about collecting?
Let us
know!