Tag: collecting

I am a collector, part 2

My rationale for owning that much music involves the notion that I should PLAY that music, and I do have an arcane methodology of listening to at least most of my CDs once a year.

In addition to the previously stated items:

Buttons: by which I mean those types of buttons that politicians give out. Some of them are from political races; I think the first is for a guy named Bill Burns, who was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Binghamton, NY, my hometown, in 1969. A lot are from various events, such as an anti-nuke rally in June 1982. Some have no political agenda at all, such as series of buttons of famous cartoonists.

I’ve been collecting for a long time, but not in any organized fashion. One button I had in high school was “Kiss Me, I’m Germ Free.” My friend Jon took a liking to it, so I lent it to him, but I never got it back.  He decided to wear it on the seat of his pants, some teacher reported him to the principal, and the principal confiscated it; bummer.

Books: I was reading somewhere that people like to judge people by the types of books they see in their living rooms when they visit. If that is indeed the case, then we might be judged as largely illiterate, for there are only about a dozen books on the first floor of our house.

However, in the office on the second floor, there are built-in bookshelves that take up about half the wall space, and they are filled with tomes. To my left and right are my wife’s books teaching guides and classic literature. In front of me as I write this are my reference books for film, music, television, sports, plus my Marvel Masterworks and other comics-related items. Behind me are texts on religion, history, biography; a lot of my Beatles-related books are there. In the attic, more Beatles, TV, and comic book stuff, in bookshelves, not in boxes; this is why the lengthy repair of the attic was so frustrating – lack of access to some of my books.

I’m actually loath to consider my books a “collection,” though I suppose others might think so. I was watching CBS Sunday Morning last month, and I saw that Doris Kearns Goodwin has hundreds of books about Presidents. My ex-girlfriend Susan had several thousands of books, at least for a time. Now THOSE are collections.

Music: as I’ve noted, I started collecting records, i.e., LPs, since about 1966, maybe 1965. When I stopped collecting them in 1989 – last purchase was some Ray Charles album – I had about 1,200 of them. Since then, though, the number has grown as people, switching over to compact discs, dumped their collections on me. I dare say the collection has doubled, with a relatively small number being duplicates.

For a brief time, I was collecting cassette tapes, but I discovered soon that they wore out too quickly. Still, there is music that I only have in that form. BTW, I NEVER owned an 8-track player, so I avoided those altogether.

I got my first CDs in 1987, and I probably still get a half dozen CDs each year, for my birthday and Christmas at least. My CDs number more than 1,500 because I started putting them in new furniture my wife wanted me to get – it wasn’t MY idea – but they didn’t fit. Some of them are on the Amazon Cloud, which doesn’t FEEL like a collection at all.

My rationale for owning that much music involves the notion that I should PLAY that music, and I do have an arcane methodology of listening to at least most of my CDs once a year. I’m sure I’ve even described the process in this blog, though I know not where, but if you REALLY want to know, you can Ask Roger Anything later this month.

I am a collector

Yes, sometimes, I would manually calculate BA and ERA, because it was fun.

Chuck Miller wrote a piece about collecting, which inspired this.

Stamps

My actual stamp collecting was only for a year or two when I was eight or nine, but I have my great aunt’s book of stamps from around the globe. It’s a fascinating tome, mostly unfilled, but it tells an interesting story of the world from the period before World War II.

There were times, particularly in the 1980s and I was doing mail order when I would keep an interesting stamp that came in, but it was in no particularly organized way, and I have no idea where they are today.

Coins

I used to collect pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars. I knew about the mints in Philadelphia (P) (generally unmarked in the day) from Denver (D) and even San Francisco (S). But the theft of the half dollar coins in my childhood soured me.

I was getting the Presidential $1 coins, but they are so unpopular with the general public, they are only available to coin dealers. So last year, and again this year, I capitulated and spent $2.95 each for a P & a D for each $1 Presidential dollar, starting with Chester A. Arthur. Ticks me off that Americans haven’t taken to the dollar coins, because I love them.

If I see a wheat penny (1909-1958), I throw it into my Mickey Mouse bank that I’ve had for decades.

Baseball cards

From about 1960 on, I was collecting baseball cards. Most of them were from a company called Topps, but I also had some that were on the back of boxes of Post cereals, e.g. I remember some gold and red cards, but no longer its provenance.

What I do remember is reading the backs of the cards to read each position player’s AB (at bats), number of H (hits), 2B (doubles), 3B (triples), HR (home runs) and the BA (batting average.) Pitchers were measured by W (wins), L (losses), K (strikeouts), BB (walks), IP (innings pitched and ERA (earned run average). Yes, sometimes, I would manually calculate BA and ERA, because it was fun.

Unfortunately, I had left my cards at my grandmother’s house when I went to college, and kept them in this olive green container, which was stolen in the great theft of 1972.

Subsequently, I bought a couple season sets of Topps cards in 1986 and 1987. Alas, they were in the damp basement of my current abode, and they’ve stuck together in a mass i just can’t bear to look at. Maybe a few are salvageable.

Hess trucks

I described this collection here. Not much more to say except it remains on my annual Christmas list. My friend Mary still has some earlier ones I’ll buy when I can afford to.

Comic books

I wrote about the origins of my collecting in this narrative for Trouble with Comics. In college, I was buying my new comics, first at an inconvenient convenience store in Highland (NY), then at the Crystal Cave, in New Paltz, one of the first true comic shops. But in addition to the store and mail order, you could buy comics at garage sales and the like.

In the 1980s, I was buying virtually all the Marvels, plus almost all the “independents”, such as Pacific, First, et al. Not so much DC, though the stories not so tied to the universe, such as Warlord, I’d get. Once I left FantaCo in 1988, and wasn’t getting a discount anymore, I cut back, getting most Marvels, but also the weirder stuff.

By the 1990s, it wasn’t that I hated comics, but I hated the comic market, with innumerable #1s and even #0s. So I sold my collection in 1994. It wasn’t until this past summer that I came across a cache of comics I bought in 1993 and 1994, unread. So maybe it WAS also that comics themselves had lost their luster for me. I also found, only this summer, a magazine box of Savage Sword of Conan, and the Hulk, and Marvel Preview, which I had meant to sell two decades ago, but somehow missed.

Almost every year the first Saturday in May, I go to Free Comics Day, and it’s like visiting a place I used to live. I pick up random items.

I do still have books of comic art: Elfquest, Groo, the original Dark Knight saga, Swamp Thing, and those Marvel Masterworks, among others.

Enough of this; next time out, books and music. A LOT of music.

Q is for Queen Elizabeth II on stamps and coins

No living person can appear on US postage or money.

Because it’s been 60 years since she ascended to the throne in the United Kingdom, there have been a number of commemorative coins and stamps issued with the image of Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. But long before that, QEII’s image has been showing up around the world.

I came across The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, as they appear on World Banknotes, which is an interesting evolution of the Queen, now in her ninth decade.

Her portrait was first featured on coins in 1953 issued in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Fiji, Jamaica, Malaya & British Borneo, Mauritius, New Zealand, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Whether or not she is wearing her crown depended on the monarchy’s relationship with the country.

Someone asked: How many countries coins has Queen Elizabeth II been on? The best answer seems to be from Sap, posted 1/27/2010, from which I will note here (since the permalink doesn’t work):

* circulation coins used to have Queen’s portrait but no longer do so today
# only commemoratives have featured the Queen’s portrait

Australia, Bahamas*, Belize, Canada, Cyprus*, Dominica#, Gambia*, Great Britain, Grenada#, Jamaica*, Kiribati#, Mauritius*, New Zealand, Nigeria*, Papua New Guinea#, Saint Kitts & Nevis#, Saint Lucia#, Saint Vincent & Grenadines#, Seychelles*, Tuvalu, Uganda*, Zambia*, plus Fiji (“a Republic and expelled from the Commonwealth but still has the Queen on all its coinage”). This doesn’t even count the various former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean (including current Guyana), Hong Kong, and what is now Malaysia and Singapore, all of which had had QEII on the money in the day.

Check out a timeline of the Queen’s appearance on Australian coins.

As for postage, you find useful Queen Elizabeth II: A Portrait in Stamps (Paperback) By Fay Sweet. The description of the book: “Since her accession to the throne in 1952, the Queen’s image on UK stamps has become one of the most familiar and reproduced icons of all time. This book illustrates the reign of Her Majesty as celebrated on Britain’s stamps.” Here’s a List of British postage stamps. This commercial vendor has a detailed QEII section.

In Canada, there is have been annual definitive stamps bearing the Queen’s likeness. I couldn’t find as definite a piece about QEII on stamps as I did for coins, but I expect a large overlap.

All of this is very, well, foreign, to me, since no living person can appear on US postage or money. There will postage stamps commemorating former Presidents a year after they die. The FDR dime and the JFK half-dollar were both issued in the year following their respective deaths (1946, 1964, respectively).

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

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