Is It Just Me? Chat! Collecting? Why?

[Foofoogal]

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?t=46609

Reading this thread made me realize I believe this is the one thing all the FLers have in common. Though we are sometimes worlds apart on values or politics or religious thoughts we all love vintage it seems.
I would love to hear ( and I know we have touched off and on over the years this topic.) why we think we are so attracted to certain things to obsession.
Like someone stated 250 ties.
As a dealer I am very curious why I do the things I do.
I pick up constantly items to sale. I do not know though why some I will list with no problem. Others you would have to pry out of my hands. It is not even the monetary value in my thinking.
Is it that certain things represent something to us? Memories? What we think is worth cherishing. I know with me it is that I am willing to share some things but do not trust others to cherish certain things as much as I think I would care for them. Very odd I know but true.
I may be wrong but over the time reading here we each have our things. Lizzie I believe is all about preserving Radio I believe for example.
Lauren I see as knowing antique clothing. Others cars, mens wear.
I don't personally know anyone in real world that works in a museum preserving items but is this a part of why they go into the field.
Some here are trying to preserve the values or music of past.
We really are as much connected as disconnected here and have this in common.
Sometimes I feel I am the only conservative on this board but when I see and hear the way vintage is appreciated I know we are a bit alike.



I am trying to reevaluate my life as well as it is the new year and my business so bear with me. I need to curb it all in a bit and am struggling with it.

 

[Foofoogal]

evidently just me:eusa_doh:

 

[scotrace]

I remember as a kid visiting my favorite aunt and uncle. Aunt Kate's house was always absolutely spotless. In the basement, which was finished, they kept their "antiques," which I think were mainly Uncle Floyd's. He had, and I don't remember why, two Edison phonographs displayed down there, with shiny brass horns. I thought they were the absolutely coolest thing I'd ever seen or ever would, even at age 6 or something. It became a life-long collecting interest.
My grandparents had this early 40's Hoover vacuum that for some strange reason captured my imagination. I'm just now becoming interested, again, thanks to a thread by Forgotten Man. How weird is that? A small boy asking to play with grandma's sweeper rather than the toys?
Grampa had his mother's pocket watch. I fussed over that too and still love them. He also wore felt hats, and, wanting to be just like him when I grew up, I have, uh a few of those now.
But then there are the other things that I've acquired not due to family connections but just because they hooked me. Old technology in general (phones, tools, gadgets). I have a thing for Empire period furniture and decorative objects. A pile of Persian carpets can turn me to jelly. Old silver (worn old hotel pieces are amazing things), flatware, old leather goods, canine art, fountain pens, well-worn copper cookware, brass candlesticks, old magazines, "Turkish" pillows... on and on.

Who knows why for much of it? But the collecting bug in general, the ability to fixate and obsess, I've thought in the past is one of those things in life that comes along as a replacement for something that is missing in life. Affection, friendships, whatever. But the fixations strike when I'm happy and fulfilled as well as when down and lonesome.

What I wonder is why some people become dealers in stuff. How do you make the leap from gathering to disseminating? It has always been really hard for me to part with something. To trade what I have for something that may or may not be as good. How DO you SELL stuff that you've tried so hard to get your hands on?

 

[scotrace]

That reminds me. I want to start a "Show us your rugs" thread.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

What I wonder is why some people become dealers in stuff. How do you make the leap from gathering to disseminating? It has always been really hard for me to part with something. To trade what I have for something that may or may not be as good. How DO you SELL stuff that you've tried so hard to get your hands on?

I think I can answer your questions.


Collectors become dealers when they've accumulated more stuff than money and space, and its cramping their lifestyle/relationships/whatever.


They also become dealers when they've "traded up" on stuff, need to unload the detritus, and have gained the knowledge (and a group of potential customers) to do so.


Finally, people become dealers when they begin to lose the desire to keep what they collect. For them, the hunt, score and sale have become more interesting than the hoarding.


With vintage menswear, it's a compromise: you can easily let go of and sell the stuff that doesn't fit you, while keeping the things that do.



.

 

[Miss 1929]

So many reasons...

I grew up in a house full of Danish Modern mid-century furniture (and I hate it). When I was about 4, my parents were looking for the house to buy. They fell in love with a huge Victorian, but at the showing met another couple who had all antiques, so they let them buy the house. Luckily, our families became close and I still got to go and enjoy the Smiths house a lot!
They had wonderful things - Chinese carved furniture, glass and silver galore, fancy clocks, queer old pictures, and a ton of great old books. I loved it all.
So some of my fetishes for collecting can be directly traced back there.
I also had a huge dollhouse, with an Oriental opium den, a ballroom, and a roof garden - and I seem to be decorating my house in a lot of the same choices as I made in the dollhouse!
Jewelry is also a weakness, and an obsession when it comes to having matching sets.

So no, you are not alone...and it does go to show - even people as diverse in religion and politics as FooFooGirl and I can come together on the grounds of collecting and the joy of the antique world.

 

[Diamondback]

The guns, railroad stuff and the cars I've targeted for acquisition and/or construction are all either artifacts of individuals (real or fictional) who've had an influence on me or relatives, or represent significant pieces in American history. The WWII miniatures, my retirement goal is teaching college WWII history and I'm trying to snag my preferred visual-aids while they're available.

The stuffed sharks, they're what trace of a whimsical side I've managed to develop.

The planes I plan to build: The A-6 Intruder and A-10 Warthog are personal favorites, and there's no way the Pentagon would sell a Mere Prole either even if it was disarmed, so my only option is to build 'em myself. (The A-6 also falls under the first thing I mentioned, being Jake Grafton's "weapon of choice" in Flight of the Intruder. Then again, so does the latter, given the influence of the eccentric A-10 drivers in James Ferro's HOGS series...)
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Now playing: John Williams - The Canyon Of The Crescent Moon
via FoxyTunes

 

[Miss 1929]

How many stuffed sharks? I must admit, that sounds cool.

 

[Dr Doran]

My grandfather was born in the 1890s, and I remember going to his house when I was a small child in the 1970s. He had a lot of black antique furniture. I guess he just liked black a lot. I have a cool black floor lamp of his. He was a smart man, and had made 3 circular koi ponds in his back yard. He also taught speech and rhetoric at L.A. City College. He lived in a part of L.A. that later became unfriendly to, and dangerous for, persons of his ethnic group, and when he died, my father sold that house. I was always fascinated with the old stuff there. My father is a composer and always had a study in our house and it was full of dark wood antiques such as a grand piano and various dark wood varnished bookshelves, little tables, and such, including a marble-topped metal table with claw feet. I was fascinated by those feet. On the walls were an old Picasso print and several old things, and a spear and tribal mask he brought back from Africa. All of that exerted a strong pull on me, especially compared to my mother's taste for the rest of the house, which was light wood and boring bland stuff. (She even painted old dark wood antiques white ... horrifying.) To me, my dad's study was a magical place of weird and beautiful artifacts. Too bad he wasn't always consistent, and a few (very few, to be fair) of the pieces there were ugly and modern light wood, which always looked incongruous and terrible. When I was a child I vowed I'd have a dark wood house full of interesting odd artifacts for myself and visitors to pick up and wonder about. The weird puppet films of the Brothers Quay also affected me strongly: I wanted to live in a house like the strange houses in their films. Something you'd imagine in Prague, crumbling and full of odd corners, glass beakers, sinister hundred years old portraits, and the like. I found a bar in Krakow that was everything to me: all dark wood, ancient wedding photos in huge frames, all antique furniture, old lamps, and you could get absinthe, and seeing that and taking pictures of that made me want that in my life, to collect that, so I could live in that.

And when I see houses with lots of dark wood antiques and cool old things, like in magazines, very often the owners of the houses will be in the photos of the interiors of the house, and they will ruin the entire effect because they will be dressed like dorks. The house will be for example all Mission furniture, just gorgeous straight-backed dark wood chairs and wonderful old rugs, and then comes Mr and Mrs Doofus with a peach colored golf shirt, hideous sandals, a dorky beard. It pains me. One of the reasons why I wear vintage (and vintage inspired) clothing is to fit into the environment that I love. I cannot afford to buy antiques at full price, but I accept somewhat busted antiques from people for free, and my house is full of them, and I'd like to think that through my collecting I have made something beautiful, old, and strange, and that I can continue to improve upon it. I want to live in a house that looks like an eccentric antique shop in one of the amazing Art Nouveau buildings in Riga, Latvia, or the farm of a slightly insane classicist in the outskirts of London, or the parlor of a collector of erotica in Berlin in about 1920.

So for me, collecting is about having a feel, and living in it, rather than only seeing it in a movie. Living in it in real life. Some day I may sell things. Who knows.

And as far as differences in politics, I'd much rather talk to someone with whom I disagree on abortion, God, and socialized medicine but who has the aesthetic interests I have, than someone who believes what I believe but has no feel for these aesthetic matters at all and thinks they are silly, or "gay," or ugly.

 

[Miss 1929]

And as far as differences in politics, I'd much rather talk to someone with whom I disagree on abortion, God, and socialized medicine but who has the aesthetic interests I have, than someone who believes what I believe but has no feel for these aesthetic matters at all and thinks they are silly, or "gay," or ugly.

:eusa_clap :eusa_clap :eusa_clap

 

[Diamondback]

How many stuffed sharks? I must admit, that sounds cool.

Lost count years ago--let's just say if I see one and don't already have one like it, I buy it. Biggest was a Discovery Channel-branded one Target had about '02 or before, about as big as my entire torso--when a Summer School program I was working on did an "undersea theme" and I loaned it to 'em as part of the decor, I was actually known to use "Fat Boy" as a pillow while catnapping for the hour or so between my day ending and my carpool's.

@ Doran: Well said--your signal Bravo Zulu!
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Now playing: John Barry - 007 Takes The Lektor
via FoxyTunes

 

[Miss 1929]

Somehow I pictured real, actual taxidermied sharks... but they wouldn't be as cuddly.

 

[Diamondback]

Yeah, I bleed easy and ain't a fan of killin' things that don't need killin', (says a guy who's on a diet that once inspired classmates to joke his initials meant "Tyrannosaurus Reincarnated"... lol ) so that just wouldn't work.

Besides, I didn't get much of a whack at having a "childhood", having tactics and nuclear-warfighting theory crammed down my throat almost literally from the minute of birth... so I guess this little quirk is partly making up for it. Hey, if Fiona Glenanne (Burn Notice's Fi) has her snowglobe collection with similar specialization, am I really so weird?lol

 

[Miss 1929]

Not a bit weird!

And watch out for those all-meat diets, really hard on the kidneys.

 

[Diamondback]

fftopic: True, unfortunately it's the only thing I can metabolize with any kind of efficiency at all. Luckily, really good kidneys run in my family... unfortunately, the electrolytes I also have to keep myself pumped full of (along with the insane caffeine intake--I make NCIS's Gibbs and Abby look like teetotalers by comparison--and massive adrenal overcharges, they're the only thing that give me any chance of keeping up with the younger folks...) don't help much either.