collections you’ve never heard of!

I am not sure what it is about the human desire to collect stuff, but one way or another we manage to collect LOTS of stuff. I don’t mean the closet full of outdated unread books, clothes that don’t fit, and software manuals circa 1987… I am referring to the collections with a theme.

We all know about collecting antiques or cars or stamps or coins. But you would be amazed at the things people seriously collect, things you may have around your house that you have no idea are valuable or interesting to someone else. Thanks to the Internet and EBay, all the obscure collectibles are visible to us all.

For example:

MARBLES

We have a friend who showed us his marble collection housed in surplus display cases off his workshop. There were hundreds of marbles on display. Unless you knew what you were looking for, they all looked like ordinary marbles. But some of them were worth thousands of dollars each. Others were worth hundreds. He showed us one Marble King “watermelon” marble from the 1950′s worth about $700. Then he pulled out an original unopened bag of 25 “watermelon” marbles in the original cellophane with the original label. He wouldn’t guess it’s value, but it had to be in the tens of thousands — valuable enough to inspire fakes (photo at right). See marble collection at http://www.marblemuseum.org/ or — for a real shock — see the marbles for sale HERE on E-BAY at the moment!

GROCERY LISTS

My friend David Strom pointed this one to me. In 1997, a guy picked up a discarded grocery list at a St. Louis supermarket. He found it to be a fascinating glimpse into a stranger’s life and decided to pick them up whenever he found them. By 2004, when the New York Times Magazine profiled him and this collection, he had about 500. Now, he has thousands of lists and recently-published book See grocerylists.org.

AIR SICKNESS BAGS

You would think that no one would collect barf bags, but guess what? They do. Lots of people. As one collector puts it, “One can tell a lot about an airline’s image from their air sickness bags. Some barf bags are no more than a baggie with a twist tie, while other sickbags could win international design competitions. Are they art? I think so. You decide.” See collections at www.airsicknessbags.com and www.sicksack.com. My personal favorite is the “Design for Chunks” series by Virgin Atlantic, in which graphic designer worldwide compete for the privilege of having their art printed on the airline’s barf bags. “Retch for the Sky!”

SOVIET RADIOS

Vitaly Brousnikin used to listen to radios with his grandfather, and eventually started a collection of old Soviet Radios. He writes, “We have seen with our own eyes the eclipse of the whole epoch – the epoch of the Soviet Union. And somehow imperceptibly the things of our common surrounding became pieces of antique… Generations change in technology but even now who of the people over 35 does not feel nostalgic of the scale and the ‘green eye’ of an old radio gleaming in the darkness.” See his collection at: oldradio.onego.ru. (Thanks also to David Strom.)

TYPEWRITERS

Typewriter collectors note that the typewriter is one of the great inventions of 19th Century communications technology. Between the 1860s and 1920s engineers, inventors and even carpenters invested
all their creativity in the development of the ultimate writing machine. This virtual museum, that is based on private collections of antique typewriters from around the world, is a tribute to their
ingenuity. See.www.typewritermuseum.org. In case you are curious, one company, Olivetti, still makes manualtypewriters… You can buy them online for about $100.

[marbles photo by Sam Fentress]