Collectors Weekly’s been around for a couple of years now; we’re proud of what we’ve done so far, but there’s lots more to do.

One of the biggest questions in our field has been how to get younger people involved in collecting. I’m happy to say that when we started The Collectors Weekly in 2007, the median age of our team was 19. The youngest, our CTO (Chief Technology Officer) Andrew Sutherland, was 17, a junior in high school – he’s now contributed more to advancing the knowledge of collectors than almost anyone I know.

In addition to his work on Collectors Weekly, Andrew also built another website, Quizlet.com, a free educational study site (online flash cards) for high school and college students. What an awesome example of innovation – built by a high school sophomore with persistence and passion and smarts, this site now serves over a million students a month.

Fast forward to today’s news: both Collectorsweekly.com and Quizlet.com are now part of a new company Andrew and I have created called Old School Industries LLC.

Why call it Old School? Because though we’re using modern technology and we aren’t really …

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By Maribeth Keane and Joyce Millman (Copyright Collectors Weekly 2009)

In part one of our interview with her, Merikay Waldvogel talks about the history of American quiltmaking (see also part two on Collecting American Quilts). Waldvogel is an internationally known quilt historian, lecturer, and author. Among her books are “Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930” and “Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression,” which is regarded as the key work on mid-20th century quilts and quiltmaking. She is on the board of the Alliance for American Quilts and the American Quilt Study Group, …

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By Maribeth Keane and Joyce Millman (Copyright Collectors Weekly 2009)

In part two of our interview with her, Merikay Waldvogel discusses how she got into quilts and offers advice for collectors (see also part one, on The History of American Quiltmaking). Waldvogel is an internationally known quilt historian, lecturer, and author. Among her books are “Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930” and “Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression,” which is regarded as the key work on mid-20th century quilts and quiltmaking. She is on the board of the Alliance for American …

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By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway

John Hotchner is a writer, editor, researcher, and lecturer on stamps. He has served on numerous boards, including the American Philatelic Society, the United States Stamp Society, and the American Association of Philatelic Exhibitors, and is currently a member of the Postmaster General’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s Council of Philatelists. Hotchner collects stamps from 20 countries, but his chief passion is U.S. errors, freaks, and oddities, or EFOs.

My father was a stamp collector, and I just took to it. He was perfectly happy to mentor me, so I …

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Lately I’ve been on kind of a David Singer binge. In case you don’t know, David Singer was one the most prolific San Francisco poster artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, creating 66 concert posters for rock promoter Bill Graham between 1969 and 1971.

My Singer collection started in 1970 when I was on the Fillmore West mailing list. Being young and dumb, I did not save all of the postcards that were mailed to me, free of charge. But I kept enough of them to give me a pretty good head start on a poster …

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By Maribeth Keane and Joyce Millman

Vintage banjo collector Lowell Levinger is perhaps best known to 1960s music fans as “Banana,” the bushy-haired guitarist and keyboards player for The Youngbloods. Today, Levinger is the proprietor of Players Vintage Instruments, where he buys and sells vintage guitars, mandolins, banjos, and other musical instruments. He also performs bluegrass and folk music for families under the name Grandpa Banana. Recently we spoke with Levinger about vintage banjos and the evolution of the instrument, from its African roots to its role as a bluegrass staple.

I bought my first really good bluegrass banjo …

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By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway

Ken Sanders has been buying and selling books almost his entire life. A fan of illustrated books and books about the American West, Sanders is an appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, a publisher (dreamgarden.com), and a seller of rare and used books from his store in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is also well known for the role he played in catching an infamous book thief, which is the subject of a book by Allison Hoover Bartlett called “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a …

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By Ben Marks

A.C. Dwyer, an avid coin collector, talked with us recently about the history of U.S. $20 double eagle gold coins, especially those struck during the California Gold Rush. Dwyer discusses the types of double eagles that were minted, the most interesting and rarest varieties, and why he’s so enthralled with coins that have been found at shipwreck sites. Dwyer can be contacted via his website, acdwyer.com.

The double eagle is really a result of the California Gold Rush. Prior to the California Gold Rush, the biggest gold discoveries were relatively small strikes in Georgia and North Carolina. …

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By Maribeth Keane and George Spencer

Tony Hyman has been collecting cigar boxes since he was 12. By his 17th birthday, he had amassed a collection of some 2,300 boxes. Recently, we spoke to Hyman about his online National Cigar Museum, which is a great resource for collectors looking to date U.S., Canadian, and Cuban cigar boxes. We also discussed the legendary self-igniting cigar and the history of cigar manufacturing in New York City. Hyman can be reached via his museum’s website, www.cigarhistory.info, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

The National Cigar Museum has been open for …

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