I collect a few things: old cameras, musical instruments from the countries that I visit and hard-backed photographic books of all of the countries I have been to.

I have about 40 old camera but my favorite one is the one that my parents picked up for me in France at a Flea Market with glass negatives and a wooden tripod. (It is prominently displayed in my living room.)

As for the musical instruments, they are sometimes a hassle to get home but great reminders of where I have been and the experiences I had while acquiring them.

As for the photographic books, my Mom started this collection for me when I was in HS after my first trip to Europe and both of us have kept it going.

Thanks for another great post Merrill.

Kim

As a kid I collected baseball cards casually. There were so many that I knew I’d never get a complete set, but I did manage to amass a complete collection of Ted Williams cards (how I wish I still had those!) The cards I remember most fondly, though were non-sports cards; Three Stooges, Monsters and my all-time favorite card series, Civil War News. Both my brother and I collected complete sets.

In 1962, the Aurora Plastics Corp released it’s first figure model kit based on a movie: The Frankenstein Monster. The kit was hugely successful and spawned a whole series of monster/horror kits and I built everyone of them until the series was discontinued in the late sixties. They became very collectible and all have been reissued recently. My favorite here was a working guillotine model.

In the 90s I collected Starting Lineups, sports action figures made by Kenner. I really enjoyed the “thrill of the hunt” for “rare” figures and developed a lot of friends and trading partners across the country. I stopped when they became just too difficult to find at retail. Dealers were bribing Toys R Us employees to sell them complete cases (and TRU did nothing to stop it, which still has me POed) and that ultimately killed the hobby. But I used to love presenting my friends with figures of favorite sports star that they didn’t know existed. I still remember the look on Ed Sugar’s face when I gave him a Gary Linneker soccer figure.

I’m a big movie buff and have always collected movies in some form or another. When I was a kid, you could buy 8mm condensations 3 -10 minute excerpts, usually in black and white with subtitles. There weren’t a lot of titles to pick from, but at that time, actually owning a complete movie was unheard of. I went through various tape and disc formats and today have a very expansive collection of DVDs (a few more than Ed and Marion’s collection of CDs). The dvd explosion really made it possible to put together an eclectic collection and once again, I am buying and trading all over the owrld (many dvd players, especially the cheap ones, can be “hacked” to play dvds from anywhere and I was licky enough to locate copies of films that I had literally spent 30 years trying to see: Orson Well’s “Falstaff” and Olsen and Johnson’s “Hellzapoppin’” I have my dvds arranged in a way that makes sense to me and I am waiting for the day when someone views my collection and says “I see how you’ve got them filed..”. I colelct all types of films but am obsessive about some favorite directors (Sam Peckinpah, Robert Aldrich, John Ford) stars (Vincent Price, John Wayne) and genres (I’m a sucker for Spaghetti Westerns).

i would also say: my cheapness > than my obsession

When I was around 25, she made a comeback and I began a competition with my best friend – we would order things off e-Bay from Japan, we would drive all over to the Sanrio stores (this was before HK was all over like she is now). It was intense and insane. I have, to this day, two large rubber-maid containers filled with HK stuff (pencils, day runners, stickers, stamps, etc, you name it, I’ve got it…)

It became very expensive and extremely dysfunctional so I still do buy HK merchandise, but only if it is functional – for example, I have HK tweezers, a HK shower cap – things I actually need, not just cute things …

Now, why doesn’t HK have a mouth? why is Sanrio tying to keep her quiet? What does she know that they don’t want let out? A whole different question!! HMMM… :0)

Once I moved out of my parents’ house, I started buying magnets and Christmas ornaments from each place I visited. Although since we got a stainless steel refrigerator, I have abandoned the magnet collecting. I still collect ornaments.

I collect sneakers, I have about 40 pairs at the moment and plan keep adding to the collect. It’s a pretty expensive habit, but I have fun trying to track down certain pairs and search all over the internet for the best prices.

I also have a pretty big dvd collection it’s not nearly as big as grandpa’s because I’m pretty sure he has more dvds then a blockbuster. But maybe I’ll get to that point someday