The End of the Collector Mindset

[scottyrocks]

I've been thinking about the word 'collection.'

I have never purchased anything with intent of 'collecting' it, or it being a part of a 'collection.' Yet here I am with little groups of objects that can be labeled 'collections.'

My mentality is anti-get-the-whole-set. I just buy, or otherwise acquire, things I like. Often there are multiples of similar items. But I always seem to stop short of getting out of control. I get enough of what I like, and that's it. Is that a collection, or is that a collection?

Of course, the reason these things can even be thought of as 'collections' is that they never seem to leave, and are usually stored together. I have some little collections that are 50 years old.

And most of them have no value, except to me. And that's perfectly fine.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Then too, there are those "collectibles" that were driven entirely by the interests of a specific generation. The explosion of big-money sports-card collecting in the early 1980s was driven by the nostalgia of the first wave of boomers for the players of their childhood. But there are now millions of adult Americans who have never heard the name "Mickey Mantle," and can see no rational reason to pay thousands of dollars for a piece of old cardboard with his picture on it. A market driven by nostalgia is the most unstable market there is.

 

[Fading Fast]

Then too, there are those "collectibles" that were driven entirely by the interests of a specific generation. The explosion of big-money sports-card collecting in the early 1980s was driven by the nostalgia of the first wave of boomers for the players of their childhood. But there are now millions of adult Americans who have never heard the name "Mickey Mantle," and can see no rational reason to pay thousands of dollars for a piece of old cardboard with his picture on it. A market driven by nostalgia is the most unstable market there is.

I agree with this - nostalgia drives a lot of it and that's a fickle variable - but then there are those items that for history / uniqueness / or some other reason transcend nostalgia. Is there a person alive today who ever saw Honus Wagner play baseball (or ever knew anyone named Houns)? I doubt it, but his card is still worth crazy millions.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think there are probably people who know him *only* as a baseball card, as though he were some kind of abstraction rather than an actual man with big hands who scooped up pebbles and threw them to first base along with the ball. But cases like that, where the fact of the item itself has entered popular culture, are the exception. They say the Eddie Plank card from that same set may be even rarer than the Wagner, but it attracts nowhere near the value or the interest, because it hasn't had decades of publicity about how rare it is. And Eddie Plank was a good player, too. Despite the popped collar.

 

[HanauMan]

Never heard of the players above, but I still have my first ever baseball card though the rest of the card collection was disposed of decades ago. It is a 3-D Super Stars Anthony Darrin Horton card from 1969 / 70. Came out of a cereal box and, yeah, I never heard of him either! Guess I was about 5 years old when I got it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Tony Horton! He was supposed to be the next best thing on the Red Sox, but he wasn't, and they traded him to Cleveland -- where he suffered a mental breakdown in 1970, quit the team, and never played, saw, or mentioned baseball to anyone ever again. That's one you don't hear much about in the nostalgia books.

Here's a searing piece on Horton by an Indians fan who rode him mercilessly from the cheap seats in the midst of his breakdown, and finally grew up enough to realize there are actual human beings inside those uniforms:
https://deadspin.com/5548412/taunti...er-he-slit-his-wrists-a-cleveland-fan-repents

 

[tonyb]

To me there is nothing more inviting than the home of a collector because he or she, unlike many people today, sees his or her home as more than just a pit stop -- merely a place to eat, shower and grab a few hours sleep.

I work from home. I spend most of my time here, 20-plus hours per day on average, I'd guess. So this environment matters to me. Its state affects my disposition and my productivity.

We're far from well-heeled, but I consider myself fortunate to have enough surplus scratch to furnish and decorate this place in a manner that appeals to me. I don't buy new things at West Elm or Restoration Hardware or Design Within Reach. (The anti-snob snob in me thinks of those places as stores for people with more money than imagination who need other people to tell them what looks good.) But I will spring for a good deal on a used example, or for a particularly appealing piece of old advertising art, or yet another tribal rug, or for some piece I never knew I wanted until I saw it at the junktique store and envisioned it in our place. Chump change, by West Elm standards, but no one would mistake our house for anyone else's. And I like that people like visiting here.

 

[Fading Fast]

Tony Horton! He was supposed to be the next best thing on the Red Sox, but he wasn't, and they traded him to Cleveland -- where he suffered a mental breakdown in 1970, quit the team, and never played, saw, or mentioned baseball to anyone ever again. That's one you don't hear much about in the nostalgia books.

Here's a searing piece on Horton by an Indians fan who rode him mercilessly from the cheap seats in the midst of his breakdown, and finally grew up enough to realize there are actual human beings inside those uniforms:
https://deadspin.com/5548412/taunti...er-he-slit-his-wrists-a-cleveland-fan-repents

That reads like some very, very honest writing.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

 

[tonyb]

I've been thinking about the word 'collection.'

I have never purchased anything with intent of 'collecting' it, or it being a part of a 'collection.' Yet here I am with little groups of objects that can be labeled 'collections.'

My mentality is anti-get-the-whole-set. I just buy, or otherwise acquire, things I like. Often there are multiples of similar items. But I always seem to stop short of getting out of control. I get enough of what I like, and that's it. Is that a collection, or is that a collection?

Of course, the reason these things can even be thought of as 'collections' is that they never seem to leave, and are usually stored together. I have some little collections that are 50 years old.

And most of them have no value, except to me. And that's perfectly fine.

Pretty much my angle on it. I don't buy stuff with an eye toward selling it. If its monetary value does appreciate, well, okay, that's nice for whoever gets this swag after I've gone cold.

As I've noted before, I like interesting old stuff, but I wouldn't want it to be my business.

Which is not to say I don't keep tabs on what the old stuff I like is selling for. I know a bargain when it comes my way. Usually.

 

[KY Gentleman]

Last year my wife and I decided to retire to South Carolina and live near the beach. That entailed our downsizing a huge amount of our possessions as we sold a fairly good sized house and moved into a cottage style home.
We opened up our surplus stuff for family and friends with an invitation to come and take what you want, and take as much as you like.
Then we had a series of yards sales and garage sales and listed things on eBay.
By the time we had sold our house and were ready to leave, we still had a U-Haul truck worth of stuff we donated to a charity.
The stuff I had held on to and moved from place to place seemed to be only special to me.
Once I put sentimental value aside and let it go I did feel a lot lighter and more free.
Maybe younger people have figured out less is more, freedom from the freight of souvenirs and sentimental possessions allows you to pick up and go without encumbrance.
(I kept my hats, though!)

 

[tonyb]

Last year my wife and I decided to retire to South Carolina and live near the beach. That entailed our downsizing a huge amount of our possessions as we sold a fairly good sized house and moved into a cottage style home.
We opened up our surplus stuff for family and friends with an invitation to come and take what you want, and take as much as you like.
Then we had a series of yards sales and garage sales and listed things on eBay.
By the time we had sold our house and were ready to leave, we still had a U-Haul truck worth of stuff we donated to a charity.
The stuff I had held on to and moved from place to place seemed to be only special to me.
Once I put sentimental value aside and let it go I did feel a lot lighter and more free.
Maybe younger people have figured out less is more, freedom from the freight of souvenirs and sentimental possessions allows you to pick up and go without encumbrance.
(I kept my hats, though!)

If there were one word to characterize my early years, it would be "instability."

My father died when I was four months old. My mother remarried. My stepfather was a quick-tempered, hard-drinking womanizer who couldn't hold a job nor manage a business, a plain truth about himself of which he went to his grave totally oblivious. (You'd think that multiple bankruptcies would have taught him something, but no.)

We moved, often. Parental promises were worth about what I paid for them.

My adjustment, and that of my since-deceased brother, was to create our own stability -- to stay put, to build value and equity slowly and steadily, to be almost reflexively leery of any "big new thing." And, truth be known, to hold on to stuff that we wouldn't likely ever find practical use for again.

This habit of mine leaves me with some insight into hoarder mentality. I can understand how people who grew up in emotionally and materially insecure circumstances wish for tangible things to hold on to. It comforts them. It helps fill that hole in their psyches.

I've known hoarders. A good friend could fairly be described as such, which he readily acknowledges and which he is addressing.

I recall two women I dated back in my single years -- both were well-dressed and held down responsible positions and from all outward indications were "normal" and healthy. But both were initially reluctant to have me over to their apartments, not because they didn't want the, um, companionship, but because they were embarrassed by the condition of their living spaces. So much stuff piled up that you couldn't see the floor. So much stuff that you had to move things off a chair to have a place to plant your rump. One of these women was an avid shopper. New clothes with the tags still attached were piled up. It didn't make me think any less of them, because their ways hurt only themselves, as best I could tell. But it did have me feeling sorry for their afflictions.

 

[tonyb]

I wasn't planning on walking through an antique mall yesterday, but it was across a parking lot from a branch bank I stopped in to deposit a check and I had an unclaimed half hour or so, so ...

Prices are lower almost across the board -- "real" antiques and merely vintage stuff alike. I didn't buy anything, but if I had another place to furnish I might well have.

Thing is, much of the furniture there has some intrinsic value. We kinda do need chairs and tables and beds and dressers and, and, and ...

Is the current state of the old furnishings market a cyclical phenomenon or is old stuff going the way of the dodo? I suspect it's the former. Right now, it's mostly better stuff than what can be had new, at much better prices.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The decline in popularity of "brown goods" seems to be going on everywhere -- basically, as the Boomer Die-Off accelerates, there's coming to be a glut of "old family furniture" on the market that nobody wants. The younger generations seem to value the ease of likely future moves to stocking a place with a lot of furniture they don't really need just because it belonged to Grandma -- honestly, who needs a big mahogany dining room table, with expansion leaf and chairs complete, when you're twenty-five years old and not only don't have a "dining room" but wouldn't "dine" in one if you did? And some of it is aesthetic: bulky dark-colored furniture just doesn't look good in a cramped rental-white apartment. I know a lot of kids who wouldn't bother with a big waterfall bureau because they do just fine storing their stuff in an array of milk crates -- and they like it that way.

And it's not just kids who are dealing with this. Not long ago, my mother was trying to get rid of the bed she's owned since 1959 -- it was second-hand then, and it's too high for her to get in and out of. She assumed I wanted it, whioch I most certainly did not. Aside from the squick factor of knowing you're sleeping in the bed you were conceived in, it was ugly as sin and rather beat up besides. I've got a bed, and I certainly didn't want that one. So off to the dump it went.

I find perfectly good bureaus, tables, and chairs at the dump swap shop all the time -- stuff that might have been sold secondhand if anyone actually wanted to buy it. I don't need any more of those things myself, so they end up staying there until they're broken up as scrap wood and dumped in the landfill. And that's the way it goes.

 

[tonyb]

A large part of it, I suspect, is that people change residences with far greater frequency than their grandparents and great-grandparents did, and moving all that stuff is a big pain in the rump.

A couple summers back I returned to the Seattle area to retrieve some of my own stuff I had at a duplex we were selling and a pile of other stuff given to me by a friend (since deceased, alas) who was downsizing and kinda owed me a favor.

I spent as much or more moving that stuff as I could have replaced it for here locally. Rental truck, fuel, a night's lodgings, etc. I'd imagine that many people make a similar calculation and decide against holding onto that stuff.

The neighbors across the street put a quite nice wooden bed -- a "full" size, as we used to call them -- out at the curb and taped a "free" sign to it. It was there more than a week until, after it got rained on pretty heavily, the woman residing there broke it into pieces and put it in the trash bins. Had it been a queen-size -- which seems the standard these days -- it might now be gracing a bedroom in that new apartment complex about a quarter mile from here instead of moldering away in some far-off landfill.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Queen beds aren't so hot for those of us who live in small houses. I had one foisted upon me once, and it was too wide for my bedroom: I had narrow little channels I had to sidle along the walls while changing the sheets. As soon as one of the kids here needed a bed, I gave it to her and got a "full" one instead. She, in turn, found it too big for where she was living, and gave it to her brother's girlfriend, who probably has lobbed it off on someone else since.

 

[tonyb]

Yeah, newer residences have larger bedrooms, generally. And walk-in closets the size of kids' bedrooms of a century and more ago. And "en suite" bathrooms with big-ol' tubs and separate shower stalls and TWO sinks and besides a toilet some porcelain appliance designed for thorough hygiene and/or solitary entertainment.

 

[tonyb]

The decline in popularity of "brown goods" seems to be going on everywhere -- basically, as the Boomer Die-Off accelerates, there's coming to be a glut of "old family furniture" on the market that nobody wants. The younger generations seem to value the ease of likely future moves to stocking a place with a lot of furniture they don't really need just because it belonged to Grandma -- honestly, who needs a big mahogany dining room table, with expansion leaf and chairs complete, when you're twenty-five years old and not only don't have a "dining room" but wouldn't "dine" in one if you did? And some of it is aesthetic: bulky dark-colored furniture just doesn't look good in a cramped rental-white apartment. I know a lot of kids who wouldn't bother with a big waterfall bureau because they do just fine storing their stuff in an array of milk crates -- and they like it that way.

And it's not just kids who are dealing with this. Not long ago, my mother was trying to get rid of the bed she's owned since 1959 -- it was second-hand then, and it's too high for her to get in and out of. She assumed I wanted it, whioch I most certainly did not. Aside from the squick factor of knowing you're sleeping in the bed you were conceived in, it was ugly as sin and rather beat up besides. I've got a bed, and I certainly didn't want that one. So off to the dump it went.

I find perfectly good bureaus, tables, and chairs at the dump swap shop all the time -- stuff that might have been sold secondhand if anyone actually wanted to buy it. I don't need any more of those things myself, so they end up staying there until they're broken up as scrap wood and dumped in the landfill. And that's the way it goes.

If not for the documentable decline in the antique furniture business over the past decade or more it might be argued that lower unemployment rates might have more people buying new who in years past would have never set foot in a new furniture store.

But then I consider how that knife might cut both ways. Greater confidence in one's own economic prospects would also leave one likelier to dig a bit deeper into his pocket for an antique piece.

The popularity of the modernist look has coincided with the decline in the "brown furniture" market. But now I'm witnessing a trend toward more eclectically furnished interiors -- mixes of old and new and periods in between (even if stark white walls predominate). The Eames house, to which I alluded earlier in this thread, was a study in such an approach, and that's going back nearly 70 years now. Beautiful things that speak to each other belong together, no matter their age or origin.

 

[Edward]

Yeah, newer residences have larger bedrooms, generally. And walk-in closets the size of kids' bedrooms of a century and more ago. And "en suite" bathrooms with big-ol' tubs and separate shower stalls and TWO sinks and besides a toilet some porcelain appliance designed for thorough hygiene and/or solitary entertainment.

Seems to be going to opposite way here in the UK; here a "double bedroom" means nothing more than you can physically fit a double mattress into it and still open and close the door. My bedrooms in a post war (1951) block are bigger than most new build, and they're only 9'x11'. As to ensuite, I've long accepted I'll never be able to afford anything with an ensuite anywhere I'd actually want to live - more's the pity! My parents installed one in their place a few years ago, and it's fantastically convenient.

 

[tonyb]

An update from just a couple months ago.

I've been around long enough and have paid enough attention to such matters to believe this market will shift again. For now the lesson is: If you prefer old stuff to new, this is a good time to buy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/style/how-low-will-market-for-antiques-actually-go.html