| What do you collect? | Fashion + Jewelry | Watches + Clocks | Pottery + Glass | Furniture + Home | Art + Photos | Music + Movies | Toys + Games | Sports | Coins + Stamps | Paper + Books | Ads + Signs | Autos + Transport | Eras + Decades | Other » |
| What do you collect? | Fashion + Jewelry | Watches + Clocks | Pottery + Glass | Furniture + Home | Art + Photos | Music + Movies | Toys + Games | Sports | Coins + Stamps | Paper + Books | Ads + Signs | Autos + Transport | Eras + Decades | Other » |
Check out these interviews we've done with experienced and passionate collectors. Many of them have websites in our Hall of Fame. Some are museum curators, book authors, club officers, dealers, or auctioneers (suggest someone to interview). But all have deep knowledge of their specific collecting area. Enjoy!
We have a very small team here at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, so we all have to do lots of different things. I don’t look after all the dolls, but I oversee the collections. I… (more »)
I think I started collecting vintage aprons seriously probably in 1991, my first year of college. I was an absolute junkie for vintage clothing, which was pretty much all I’d worn for a long, … (more »)
When I was a kid, my mom had an antiques shop in Kansas City and then in Texas, so I was always around antiques and I always collected things. At one point, I would buy things and then sell them… (more »)
What got me interested in TV lamps? I’ve always had an interest in the tackier artifacts of the 1950s and 60s. The cheesy stuff, the kitsch. Old B movies, monster and sci-fi movies, the stuf… (more »)
I was working as a jewelry department manager for a department store, and I had a customer who brought a clock in for repair. I was able to fix her clock very quickly and easily, and I didn’t … (more »)
I’ve always been interested in antiques. As a kid, I collected a variety of stuff – fossils, rocks, minerals, natural history stuff, Indian artifacts and antiques. I grew up in Louisville, K… (more »)
Mid-century Modern used the technology of mass production to produce good-looking pieces of furniture out of the latest materials. A number of these materials became commonplace after World War … (more »)
I have about 20,000 records in my collection at my house and another 7,000 at another house. I keep them in a room in the basement that has to be humidity controlled with very little humidity at… (more »)
Ted Staunton was born in England, but now lives an active retired lifestyle in Vancouver, Canada. Ted has an outstanding collection of 78 rpm record labels. We talked about his collection, how h… (more »)
Daniel Kusrow was born in Bangkok, Thailand, but now resides and works in New York City. Daniel collects airline baggage labels, particularly those issued by airlines during the inter-War period… (more »)
Special collections is where we keep non-circulating rare materials which have to be used in the reading room. Our holdings range from one of the world’s finest collections of comic art to a r… (more »)
I started collecting cut glass when I was about 18. My sisters were married, and during the summer, I would go out and stay with them in the Midwest and work. That was back in the late ’70s wh… (more »)
About 11 years ago, my wife and I went on some architectural tours. We joined the organization that sponsored the tours, and I volunteered to be the Webmaster for them. I decided to take a few p… (more »)
How did I get started collecting advertising antiques? My dad was a lecturer and tutor in graphics and art from the 1960s onwards, and was into vintage automobiles and advertising, like vintage … (more »)
I started to get interested in typewriters around age 12. My dad and I stopped at a garage sale and he bought me this typewriter from the 1930s, and I was just learning to type at the time. It  (more »)
I’ve been a beer stein collector for about 25 years. About 10 years ago I sold my business, a specialty database provider. At that point, I had some experience in compiling databases and beer … (more »)
My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Tho… (more »)
I grew up in a home without any antiques. As a small kid, I started decorating my parents’ home for Christmas. I don’t know what influenced me, perhaps being alone and living in a rural envi… (more »)
About 42 years ago, my wife, Darla, went to a very large white elephant sale and found a box of antique Christmas ornaments. She thought they were wonderful, so she bought them, and that’s bee… (more »)
How did I get interested in clocks? Something about them has always been ingrained in me. My mom’s father had a small collection of antique clocks and when I was a little boy he showed me how … (more »)
Thirty-five years ago, after I graduated college, I needed some decoys for hunting. I had used my father’s wooden decoys ever since I could remember. My mother used to go hunting with them bef… (more »)
I grew up fishing. And I always had a few old lures – several came from my grandfather – and I just decided one day that they were pretty pieces of art as well and it would be neat to have a… (more »)
I got interested in insulators when I lived in El Cajon and my neighbor worked for San Diego Gas and Electric. His son had a bunch of insulators on the window sill in his bedroom. I had never se… (more »)
Originally my husband and I collected cylinder phonographs, but after you acquire a few of them and their stands, you soon run out of room. So, I was looking for something smaller to collect and… (more »)
My grandparents were antique collectors all their lives, their whole house was furnished in antiques. They had a lot of oil lamps and I suppose that’s where I got my first interest. I’ve alw… (more »)
Like most kids growing up in the late ’60s, early ’70s, I played with marbles. Of course I grew out of it, but I carried those good memories with me. Skip forward some years, and I was worki… (more »)
We both come from families that had collections and we both had collections as children. Jack lost his when his grandmother threw them out at one point. His grandmother collected china and glass… (more »)
I got started collecting pocket watches partly because I hated wearing wristwatches; I used to carry my wristwatch in my pocket, so I thought; why not just try getting a pocket watch. I happened… (more »)
I got interested in clocks in 1967, and I started collecting watches fairly seriously in the early ‘80s. I ran out of room for clocks. Pocket watches are a little bit more manageable, and in s… (more »)
I work for a sewing machine distribution company that was started by my late father. We mainly distribute industrial sewing machines. At a very early age, I became interested in sewing machines … (more »)
My husband, Mike, used to buy me pieces of china. One day he bought me a Jasperware blue Wedgwood thimble and I put it aside with my other pieces of Wedgwood. Later, one of his aunts left us a s… (more »)
I got interested in stock certificates by happenstance, really. I collected stamps at one point, and sold my collection to put a down payment on the house. I tried to get back into stamp collect… (more »)
How did I get started collecting antique telephones? As a kid I always liked phones, using them, talking on them. As a teenager I had some business telephone equipment that was taken out of an o… (more »)
Ron Sturgeon: I had an automotive repair shop in about 1976 and spent a lot of time repairing Mercedes. About 1979 I decided to start collecting Mercedes toy cars. I was young and naïve and tho… (more »)
I started collecting antique tractors in 1971. I’ve owned several old tractors over the years and always wound up selling them to somebody else—all but this one old 1938 Case. That old Case … (more »)
How did I start collecting cameras? Actually, I had an interest in photography as a kid and owned a darkroom by the age of 12 or 13. My interest in photography grew. I spent lots of time in a … (more »)
I started becoming interested in art glass when I moved from Texas to New York, and wanted to decorate my apartment with New York-type things, things I had never seen in Houston. I grew up in Te… (more »)
How did I get started collecting Arts and Crafts silver? My wife and I had been collecting Arts and Crafts items as far back as I can remember, mostly furniture and tiles. One day many years ago… (more »)
I’ve got one of the largest private collections of airline memorabilia in the world. Many people who’ve seen it say that there’s enough to create a museum. I have everything – silverware… (more »)
Dave Campbell contacted me after reading a post on The Baseball Card blog. He's been collecting baseball cards non-stop since 1981. He has recently created a collection of 19th century Allen &am… (more »)
About 12 years ago a coworker told me that they saw a picture sleeve on eBay from The Beatles selling for 500 dollars. My sister had given me a Beatles 45 picture sleeve when I was quite young. … (more »)
My mother brought home a bunch of openers back in 1977, and that got me started collecting. I thought it would be pretty neat to do because nobody else was collecting them. Then I heard about a … (more »)
We’ve been operating Dan’s Train Depot, which is the parent company of BrassTrains.com, for about 11 years now. We bought out a very large brass dealer about five to six years ago who owned … (more »)
Our newest book is actually the fully revised and expanded second edition of our first book. It came out originally in 1997, but needed a lot of updating because we’d done so much research sin… (more »)
I started working as the curator of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature in 1994, but I’d worked with the materials in the collection since 1989. The collection had about 90… (more »)
In 1978, I found a snuff bottle and didn’t know what it was. It intrigued me, so I bought it. Then I found some books about snuff bottles, and learned a bit about them and began looking for th… (more »)
The National Cigar Museum has been open for 10 to 12 years in various formats on the Internet, but I completely redesigned the site about four years ago. In the early days, I’d send informatio… (more »)
I’ve been around Chevy cars my whole life and had them when I was in high school. It’s a lifetime thing. Some people do Fords; others Chryslers. It can be as easy as what your first car was.… (more »)
I started collecting Coca-Cola in 1994. The World Cup soccer games were being hosted at the Stanford Stadium and I saw Coke bottles commemorating the World Cup games on the shelves. I thought, â… (more »)
As the archivist for Coca-Cola, I’m interested in preserving the history of this company. Integrally tied to that history are all of the things that we’ve used to market and promote the prod… (more »)
I always wondered if starting a hobby in my free time was a good idea, and then I remembered Ken. He was a gift to my older sister Brenda in Christmas of 1970 when I was living in Independence, … (more »)
I started off collecting comics, and still do, but I’d been given a few early Disney pinbacks as a child and always thought they were interesting. In the early 1990s, I started getting Ted Hak… (more »)
I’m the curator here at the museum in Rocky River, a suburb west of Cleveland. I look at Cowan pottery from a historian’s angle because this is part of Rocky River’s cultural history. I’… (more »)
Swann, which is New York City’s oldest specialty auction house, was founded in the late 1940s as an antiquarian book house. In the mid-1970s, as popular interest in photography became more wid… (more »)
As a teenager, I collected everything from vintage bicycles to Coca-Cola to Victorian stuff. Once I realized some of this stuff contained concepts of art and design, I started looking for vintag… (more »)
My mother was our inspiration for collecting pattern glass. She collected it, and she died at a very young age. My sister and I inherited it and my aunt said not to sell anything until we were o… (more »)
Ever since I was a child, I wanted to work in the auction business, specifically in the entertainment part. I liked the idea of handling, owning, and being a part of objects that were lynchpins … (more »)
I like mechanical things. I’ve collected outboard motors, things like that in the past. I got into the telephones probably 15 years ago, and I’ve been there ever since. Starting to collect a… (more »)
I started as a collector and I’m a web designer, so I thought I would design a website from my passion. I threw it up there and people just found me and it started to take off. Fiesta is made … (more »)
I started out with general antiques and collectibles... I was a dealer for a while and bought and sold all kinds of things. Gradually jewelry became my focus. In the mid-1980s I started getting … (more »)
I think it all started with a small pottery vase my mother obtained from the art pottery shop where she worked in the early 1920s and ‘30s. After she died in 1988, I didn’t initially didn’… (more »)
I’m the curator of the ceramics bit of the Bowes Museum. It’s a big museum with 30 galleries of which three or four are devoted to ceramics alone. Within Britain, it’s got one of the bigge… (more »)
I started collecting when I was about 10 years old. My father was in the Air Force, so he got me started collecting everything—coins, stamps, military insignias, baseball cards, all kinds of s… (more »)
My dad got me a big Lionel train set when I was about 8. Prior to that, when I was a really little kid, he would take me to watch the train switching cars in the Burlington yard in Cheyenne, Wyo… (more »)
Loetz was a Bohemian company. It was a factory; and the region’s biggest and best glass manufacturer. There were other contemporaries like Kralik, Rindskopf, and Pallme-Konig that produced gla… (more »)
I don’t actually remember exactly when I became a Marilyn Monroe fan, I’ve basically been collecting Marilyn items my entire life. I started collecting Marilyn Monroe personally owned items … (more »)
In 1994, I had the great pleasure of acquiring the complete archive of Walker Evans for the Metropolitan Museum. The archive is quite vast, including 30,000 black-and-white negatives and about 1… (more »)
I’ve been interested in jewelry since I was in high school. I’ll be 60 in September, so that’s a lot of years. I wore jewelry and collected it. I liked the jewelry of our era, the late ’… (more »)
I started my site in about 1990 and my original thought was to feature NASCAR models. It’s like an online model show. I specialized in NASCAR so that seemed the way to go. It’s worked out pr… (more »)
My background is in fine art. My B.A. was in Art Education, so I started out as an art teacher. Later, I began working on a master’s degree in art valuation and started working for galleries. … (more »)
The Baseball Hall of Fame officially opened in 1939, so we’re coming up on our 70th anniversary. If you include baseball cards, we have hundreds of thousands of artifacts. We have almost any a… (more »)
The NMRA library’s original purpose was to focus on model railroading, but over time we’ve also received donations that have helped us become a historical resource for information on prototy… (more »)
What inspired me to collect old jigsaw puzzles? I grew up as a child with some wonderful world class puzzles in my household. They were puzzles my mother and grandmother picked up at the lending… (more »)
I’m fourth generation in the pharmacy business, so I grew up in a pharmacy, and it always was interesting to me. I also enjoyed a lot of the old black-and-white movies that had a hospital scen… (more »)
I liked to collect things even as a child. Things that didn’t cost anything, like different colors of stones. There was something about the advertising that I liked, so in the mid-1970s, I s… (more »)
I have a stamp collection, but I don’t consider myself a collector. I have a collection of my initials on stamps from Great Britain. I’ve been collecting those for a long time, but I’m a d… (more »)
Andreas Praefcke (Ravensburg, Germany) collects postcards of old and new theatre buildings worldwide. His complete collection can be seen on his website Carthalia. I spoke to him recently about … (more »)
I don’t collect posters. I don’t collect anything. I started making posters one at a time by hand in high school just for specific events, basically got going when I was a freshman. I still … (more »)
I’ve been interested in psych records for about 25 years now. It started with just 1960s music, the Beatles and stuff like that, and then I kept on checking out new things and finding new musi… (more »)
My husband Bill always loved trains and my grandfather had been an executive with the Denver and Rio Grande here. We opened up a little store in Georgetown, Colorado and sold railroad stuff. The… (more »)
I don’t remember the first Rookwood piece I ever bought, that’s getting close to 40 years ago. But I must have liked it, because I kept studying and learning, and it’s been a lot of fun an… (more »)
I started collecting Roycroft around 1992 when I visited the Peter Roberts Gallery in New York City. That was sort of the peak of the Arts and Crafts mania and there were many galleries in SoHo:… (more »)
The Model T Ford Club of America is headquartered in Centerville, Indiana. We have about 115 chapters in the United States and other countries like Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany… (more »)
I always wanted to work in film, but I didn’t have anybody in my family who worked in the film business. I’ve been a major movie buff since I was a child, and I’ve always been very meticul… (more »)
I’m a packrat, so in 1995, I was itching to collect something. I went around to local flea markets here because they’ve got the Rose Bowl Flea Market and the one in Long Beach. I bought a fe… (more »)
I was 10 when the movie came out and I went to the store and bought a couple of packs of Star Wars cards. But I ended up trashing all the cards I had when I was a kid, and in my collection today… (more »)
In 1998, while going through my parents' estate, my wife and I found some glassware made by Anchor Hocking between the 1940s and the 1960s as promotional items for laundry detergent and gas stat… (more »)
Mark Scalise grew up in Southern California before moving to Boston a few years ago. He's been going to Bob Dylan concerts for more than 20 years. In the following interview, we talked about… (more »)
My first book, "Tramp Art, One Notch at a Time", was self-published in 1998. At the time we started to do the book, it was just assumed that tramp art was made by tramps, but as we were examinin… (more »)
I started collecting coins when I was five years old, and I started dealing when I was 13 or 14. Most kids start with coins of circulation—I had albums for Jefferson nickels, Lincoln pennies a… (more »)
Like many collectors, I collected when I was a child, and then I became interested again in the ‘90s. I think eBay and other Internet auction sales had a little bit to do with it. I just start… (more »)
When I was around 10, my grandfather passed away, and my dad brought home his Victrola and stuck it under the stairs in the basement. He didn’t want it or care about it. It was a 1917 - my gra… (more »)
How did I get started collecting Victorian Furniture? Antiques is in my genes, my mother's family were longtime antiquers and lived in a house built in the 18th Century. But it really hit me abo… (more »)
Malcolm Warrington is based 12 miles to the west of Central London. He is a council member of the UK Ephemera Society with responsibility for the society's web site. He also has his own site, Th… (more »)
How did I start collecting Victorian trade cards? In the late 60s I was a bottle collector, early American bottles and flasks. I started noticing there were colorful trade cards that advertised … (more »)
I started collecting in 1986. If you’re in Boston and you’re a baseball fan, the Red Sox may take over your life. They take over your life in a way that other teams don’t. With the Red Sox… (more »)
Collecting Paillard-Bolex cameras was something I started doing by accident. It was a combination of several interests I had, including, photography, broadcasting and even collecting vintage rec… (more »)
At the very beginning, my interest in lighters was about the mechanism. I had my first lighter when I was 14. I saved up my nickels and dimes. I grew up in Oakland, and bought my first cigarette… (more »)
I started collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia back in the early 1970s. I was working the night shift at a company, and as I walked home one morning I took a shortcut through the woods and came acro… (more »)
I’ve been interested in comic books since I was very young. My two older brothers had Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comic books. I grew up watching cartoons and my favorite ones were always Sp… (more »)
My husband and I have many collections. We were in London at one point in the ’80s, and I saw a fabulous collection of vintage costume jewelry. Each item was like a little object of art. I bou… (more »)
I’ve pretty much always been a little bit fashion-nutty, ever since I was about 16 years old and I discovered Vogue. I started like a lot of other people, buying vintage to recreate the looks … (more »)
I got into bass fishing in my late teens, early 20s. I was rooting around my grandmother’s basement one afternoon and I found my grandfather’s tackle box. When I opened it up, I saw this gre… (more »)
I collected football cards when I was a kid, back in the late ’60s, early ’70s. Then I set them in the closet for about 15 to 20 years and picked them up again in 1989. A friend of mine had … (more »)
I’ve always had an old Ford Model A or something to tinker around with or play with. It may not have been on the road but I was always building or working on something. Around 1975 I bought a … (more »)
When I got my first job out of college, I did what a lot of people do: I ran out and bought myself a Montblanc pen and fountain pen set. I kept that pen for years, but in the mid-’90s, I lost … (more »)
I started out primarily as a collector and the business aspect of it evolved over time, almost by accident. I didn’t start out with the intention of being a vintage guitar dealer. As a college… (more »)
I grew up in upstate New York in Rochester, and started playing guitar when I was about 10 years old. We had this place in Rochester; called the House of Guitars. It was this huge independent mu… (more »)
I started my website on vintage microphones in 2001, for a couple of reasons. One was for the benefit of my students. I taught audio controls and master control operations for radio broadcasting… (more »)
I’ve been a lifelong motorcyclist. I started riding a motorcycle when I was 11, and I started writing for magazine after I got out of school in the early ’90s. While I was working for them,… (more »)
I worked at 20th Century Fox in the publicity department, so I was always fascinated with film, and then I moved to Montreal in late ’68, right after I got married. I was in the film business,… (more »)
Our first book was called "The Independent Movie Poster Book" and that was published by Harry Abrams. The focus was all independent movies post-1980. We picked that as a cutoff because that was … (more »)
I became interested in Petroliana in a kind of roundabout way. I’ve been in the automotive repair business all my life, and have always liked cars and been interested in auto repair stuff. Pet… (more »)
I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge… (more »)
I worked for 35 years as a reference librarian with the Madison Public Library and I just got interested in Madison’s history through my reference work. My husband and I collect antiques of va… (more »)
I’m 61 now, and I’m an engineer. I was thinking if I ever wanted to collect something, I would probably collect slide rules because they’re small, they don’t take up much space, and they… (more »)
I started collecting swimwear in 2000 or 2001. I really like how vintage swimwear looks on people. It accentuates the body as opposed to showing everything off, like the modern string bikinis do… (more »)
In the 1950s when I was a teenager I used to work for a television repair shop and we’d get sets from the 40s every once in a while and I was fascinated by them. So in 1999 when I sold my busi… (more »)
I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I didn’t have any particular interest in clocks or watches as a kid; that came after I started working at Christie’s East, where I ran the Jewelry and Silv… (more »)
I started with pocket watches as a child, watching old movies on television, watching the cowboys occasionally pull out an old pocket watch. I collected pocket watches until my grandfather gave … (more »)
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. That… (more »)