Collecting things is fun!

What is it about collecting things such as antiques or collectibles that provide/ so much pleasure we accumulate more treasures than we can use, appreciate, or afford?

The thrill of the hunt.

It’s really fun to find a sleeper, where you recognize the value that no one else has, and you purchase something you know is special, for a super low price.

Sharing the story of your find.

Sleepers are not that easy to find. Sharing the details of your finds with other collectors is really entertaining. It’s fun to talk about how you had to search and how you stumbled across something or some piece of specialized knowledge that you had picked up allowed you to identify an item that no one else had noticed.

Your life is more than your job.

Many jobs are not very interesting. No one really wants to talk about work with an accountant or a dentist unless they are in the same profession.

If you have a hobby that you take seriously, you are going to find over the years other hobbyists that collect the same things, even non-collectors will find it interesting to hear details of what you do when you collect, how you find things, and how your interests developed.

Preserving History

We like to collect antiques from the 1920s and 1930s. There’s a wealth of consumer items that are simply no longer available. And people do not know what they even are.

I saw an old catalog that had 40 different axe handles. Each one specific to a particular lumbering job in the woods. There were also 40 or 50 kinds of axe heads to go with the axe handles.

It’s amazing how much there is to know about tools and techniques that are no longer important.

Nostalgia.

My father grew up farming with horses.

He had an entire vocabulary that he would use to describe how they did things back when he was a young man.

None of those really made any sense because I did not know what the words he was using referred to.

So, years later, I purchased a 1936 Shapleigh’s Hardware Store catalog and found it had 40 or 50 pages of harness and tack that were used on workhorses back in the day.

It made for very interesting reading, and I understood better what he was talking about.

Aesthetic pleasure.

We collect Lyman Bixby etchings because my wife recognized he had a superb sense of how to draw his etchings, and the quality of the work he produced was exceptional.

I enjoy them because of the way they remind me of experiences hiking in the mountains and deserts of the American Southwest.

For her, the quality of his work was a major attraction.

Social pleasure.

We started collecting seriously back in the early days of eBay.

When we first started, eBay auctions didn’t even have pictures. Buying via this new platform was a really fun way to spend an evening at home.

In those days, eBay was also a much more social, friendly kind of place. There were fewer restrictions. Bidding names were more open, and you could see who else was bidding.

We even got to know the bidder names and numbers of people we were frequently bidding against.

Completing a collection.

With any type of collectible, it’s fun to complete a collection.

Completion means that you have one of every type or a complete series of some particular item. It just depends on the item you’re collecting what completing a collection means.

For coin collectors, you might go for a type collection where you have an example of all the different Mercury dimes or some other item.

We played the “completing a collection” game with our Lyman Bixby etchings.

We had a copy of the Crump book about all his etchings and tried to buy one of each of the several hundred examples shown in Crump’s book.

After more research and experience, we found Bixby was an artist who produced work that he needed to sell. That means he really wasn’t trying to create a certain number of a certain etching. He just did what he needed to refill his stock with the items that sold well.

So, getting too serious about exactly which of his etchings you have or don’t have based on a 3/8 inch change and a trim along one edge of a plate or other minor details really isn’t a good use of time.

Investment potential.

I think investment potential is the most seductive mistake available to collectors.

It’s so easy to say, “Well, we’re getting a deal so we can sell it later and double our money.”

Unfortunately, this ignores the difficulty of selling specialized items.

Short of opening an antique shop or getting serious about selling online, it’s really hard to sell these kinds of things. The number of potential buyers is small, and the friction of selling is high.

Looking back at a lifetime of collecting.

We certainly had a great time with our collecting and accumulated an amazing variety of special, unique, and interesting items.

Unfortunately, my wife and I are members of the first cohort of baby boomers, born right after World War II.

That means we’re now at the point in our lives where we need to inventory and find new homes for the things that we accumulated over those many years.

That really is the impetus for developing the Collector’s Dilemma.

We plan to document what we’re doing to identify and curate all the items we collected and then how we handle finding new homes for them. That’s what the site will be built around.

We’ve selected several software programs that we think will help us do what we need to do to make this a reality.

We’ll be documenting our experience with the technical side of things on this website and niche websites related to specific types of collectibles.

We expect to have websites related to items from the Erzgebirge region of Germany, antique blown glassware, Native American arts and crafts of various kinds, and several other varieties of collectibles.

We hope you enjoy looking through our website, and perhaps it’ll help you on your own journey.