what do you collect? what is your most unusual collection

I collect books (especially old ones)

Blue and white porcelin

pewter

copper pots etc

aluminium kitchen ware and do-dads LOL

blue bottles

plants

bookmarks

I guess my bookmark collection is the most unusual


I need to get a grip and stay out of goodwill stores. I am running out of room.

Swords

Barware

Tequilas

Whiskeys

Gins

Brandies

Cigars

Internet porn

I collect books - specifically books about military history - but my oddest collection has to be rocks. Not because I'm a geologist - I pick up a small rock from every neat place I go. They're like souveniers. So I have my rock from the Grand Canyon and my rock from Lassen volcano and my rock from Green River, Wyoming and that pretty rock I picked up near that little stream in Vermont....

I have been paying storage for 8 years on a place in Vermont because I have a bunch of stuff, including a large box of rocks. :rofl:

And the funny thing is, I don't mark them so I have no idea where half of them came from. But they're special anyway. :)

she has a rock from everywhere she has ever been !

just because I think they are pretty and I'd like to have a speciman. Others I have collected over the years just because I think they are interesting. I don't mark mine either, but I remember where most of them came from. Friends who know about my rocks even bring them to me from their travels, like the one from the Orinoco River near Machu Piccu.

One from Lassen that was formed in the 1915 eruption and one from the Pinnacles that dates back several million years. He's the same way.

He once found the coolest little rock - sort of blood red and shaped like a kidney. It's been a talisman to him and when I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, he gave it to me to hold on to. The doctor taped it into my hand when he operated (successfully). :)

A couple of years ago, I had a scare when my doc here in California found a polyp on my ovary and my friend put that rock in the mail to me - I held on to it until a biopsy showed the polyp was benign. Then I mailed it back.

That's a good friend. :hi:

But I've accumulated a lot of vintage menswear.
I have over 400 neckties- I guess that's a "collection".

I guess the tacky souvenirs are the most unusual. I have three shelves of some pretty bizarre stuff in my office.

Along with old tachometers, gas gauges, ammeters.

I have GOT to clean out the garage.

:rofl:

I seem to have that collection in every room in the house. :crazy:

My other collections are oil lamps and cookbooks.

I ahve some great stuff. Signed Bob Dylan, Springsteen, neil young, SCi, WP,YMSB Keller Williams and many others signed. I have an orignal Acid Test poster signed by Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy.

I am so damned jealous !

even though I was born in the late Sixties, after the First Wave had already died out. There are a lot more current bands playing surf than most people think, though, luckily for me. :)

:shrug:

If anyone has any that have been laying around for decades, contact me.

Just get in touch with these guys:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/42550.html

Good luck!

:rofl:

I have fox and raccoon sculls and a big jawbone of something big like a moose maybe?
And I have a taxidermied mouse dressed as Hamlet :headbang:



Other than that I collect regular stuff- books, seashells, old cameras, horror movies.

I'm going to order it from San Francisco, maybe for Christmas :headbang:

check my last Journal Entry....

And btw, the Fortress is under construction again...it will be up in running in a week or too...

My wife collects cobwebs.

music, books. Used to collect coins & stamps, too.

I got a ton of them

and other related political paraphernalia.

the ones the Guideons leave in the bedside table.

I write the date and place inside the front cover, then take it home.

Unfortunately many of the ones that I would like to own can't live here (at least not outdoors.)

Avon bottles, typewriters, old board games, rag dolls, ashtrays, and vintage jewelry, 40s womens' hats. Oh, and books.

That was fun but, it felt great to unload it all.

I can't part with my books. I've got almost every book I've ever owned since childhood! :)

The magnets are actaully useful. I may install a decorative metal backsplash or framed wall panel in my kitchen so that I can get them off the fridge.

down to about 100 mostly reference and poetry titles.

Your frig magnet collection made me remember, we also collected post cards. :)

I am going to have a "clean sweep" of my home and attic this fall. Then, I'm going to have a yard sale. I can't wait to have the closet space! :)

Post cards don't take up much room and you can frame them! At least the magnets have a practical use and they cost very little. :)

but I had to stop, because they got too expensive.

The nice thing is that I get to use them for fancy-dress occasions, so they don't just sit in a box or a closet

Does that count?

and pantyhose


CB

I love candles. I have tons and tons of handbags. I have tons and tons of CDs and vinyl albums.

I try not to hold onto my books too long, I like to spread the wealth.

My husband collects coins, so I guess he is the real collector in the family.

and




and of course my #1

my mother had a set of those when I was a child. What a jolt to the memory bank!

But you can leave the comics and the cats at home. :evilgrin:

I have a good sized baseball card collection, but I'm not adding to it. I also have some nice oriental rugs, but I'm not adding to that collection, either.

I have over 5000 of them.........................every different airline in the World
:hi:

You know, lapel pin sort of things. I'm currently cataloguing them, and there are a whole lot more there than I thought, at least 250, from all over the world. They make great keepsakes; they're cheap and everywhere you visit. I like to take a handful and pin them onto my Tilley hat, I've had a lot of compliments. So what if I look like a tourist, at least I don't wear knee-high black socks with sandals and shorts.

The way a ship collects barnacles.

:spray:


To quote Homer Simpson " It's so funny cause it's true"

I've got just about all of them...from the dawn of the Internet.

Hey..Don't Laugh...Someday those babies will be worth 25 maybe even 50 cents apiece!

I am the proud owner of 3 manual (non-electric), portable (the kind that come in their own suitcase) typewriters. 3's a collection, right? I don't have room for more...

I think my urge to buy them came from seeing the movie version of Naked Lunch years back. :crazy:

All were purchased at thrift stores for <$5 each.

One is a rather boring, battleship grey Smith Corona in a black case, in working condition.

The next is a beautiful baby-blue Royal in a forest green case, also in working condition, and with its manual.

And best of all is a bright aquamarine Hermes, that wasn't quite in working condition when I got it, but on my last trip to NYC, I took it to Gramercy Typewriter, and Paul Schweitzer there did an awesome restoration on it. Now it works great, and almost looks brand new too! Of course, that now means that I've got like $200 invested in a manual typewriter, but what the hell, life is short. :P :silly:
But seriously, the chance to travel to the Flatiron Building in downtown Manhattan, be recognized by the doorman as a Gramercy customer by the two typewriter-suitcases I was carrying (I wanted Paul to check the Royal too), and see the shop where IT/printing machines from the 30's until now are all jumbled in piles and varying states of repair (Gramercy Typewriter is also an authorized HP laser printer service center), and talk to the guy who repairs them all, was an experience worth paying for. Getting the Hermes shipped back to me all shiny and ready-to-go a few weeks later was icing on the cake.
I've got the manual for the Hermes too.

To me, they are relics of the industrial age, when the ability to transmit text depended on steel and machine oil, and the clatter of tangible letters and numbers smashing into a ribbon of ink, a single sheet of paper, and the platen underneath. It is doubtful that many such devices will be made by humanity ever again, and never with the quality and care that went into these old models.

Heck, I may even write some actual letters to some people on them some day...

-app

Do you buy them from museums. How do you get them? I heard that people used them 50 years ago in Vietnam is that

true. My grandfather remmebers Vietnam. When he was growing up it was on television. He said the typewriters were

electric.














(Feel old yet)

:evilgrin:

:smoke:

The sound of my dad typing on his manual typewriter at night used to sing me to sleep. Then he gave it to me, and that's when I began to write. It was a light blue Smith Corona. I wish I still had it. My dad is now sick, and I would give anything to get that typewriter back.

And Revolutionary War artifacts!

and stuffed Chimpanzees (no, not real ones)

anything Ricky Martin and Clay Aiken; if you're still reading this, Agatha Christie (okay, that one's completed); Wedgwood; vases; wine-glasses; hinged-and-leaded-glass boxes for my collected shells; Egyptian and Moghul(-style) art; "Nixon" political jewelry; and any books on: true crime (esp. J-B Ramsay, O.J., Bundy, Manson, Lindbergh); plane crashes/bombings/hijackings; the JFK assassination; 9/11); aliens; crop circles; U.S. political history from 1960 on; travel in England; American jobs/work; left-handedness; psychopathy; women's studies/matriarchal history; Hitchcock movie studies; rock-and-roll history/bios; food.

There I am, a left-handed, drunk female Anglophile crack-pot with questionable taste in music who will CUT YOU if you criticize her! :)

I have them organized by theme. Here is one page from the space theme:




I also have USSR first day of issue stamps.

Signed First Editions (especially Cormac McCarthy)

Movie posters

Replicas (like replicas of The One Ring from "Lord of Rings," samurai sword from "Kill Bill", etc...)

Autographed pictures signed by both Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie from "Girl Interrupted"

Artwork by futurists

Screenplays in their original form

Buddhist Malas and symbols

X-files stuff

Physics Textbooks that I can't understand

Just a small collection so far.

I have some choice watches I picked up in Hanoi as well as many propaganda posters.

My favorite is one from the Soviet Union announcing their Jewish homeland (somehwere near Siberia I think) and how the happy Jewish worker will be, far away from Moscow.

Not really...but I would if I could!

I don't really collect anything.

My children are very concerned about the will......

books, and logo golf balls. I was these baaaaaaad right now:

And most of them of the 'crazy' variety.

Zuni hunting fetishes. Miniature Star Trek and Star Wars vehicles. Star Trek and Star Wars action figures. Digital photographs I have taken -- mostly nature related. SPAM related stuff. Nature guidebooks. A first edition of Walden. Fossils, especially crinoids. Rusty metal. Weathered wood. I don't need a house, I need a warehouse!

P.S. I probably have others that I cannot recall at the moment.

I've got pairs from oregon, california, washington, idaho, and Canada (Friend got them for me)

Not nice ones, just cheap wooden ones you get at a teriyaki joint.

Not star trek, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Antique furniture (esp. quarter sawn oak)
Carnival glass
Vaselne glass
Art Deco glass

My strangest collection is of tiny hand-carved bone
skulls that were used by nuns on their rosaries as a
momento mori? - a reminder of motality. I have 5 so
far, the furthest away - from Peru.

I just like seeing what's inside of them. I have a drawer full of motors, wires, capacitors, used breadboards, LED's, switches, connectors, all sorts of crap.

Clinique samples (by default)
seriously I collect Lladro Christmas Bells, odd ceramic or pottery items found in traveling, certain Hallmark Ornament series, cut glass, silver bracelet charms,

my husband has a nice assortment of dinosaur figures of various types, train miniatures of various types, fossils and interesting rocks,

we both love art and pottery and we always by a Christmas ornament or something suitable for placing on the Christmas tree when we travel someplace new.