Collecting is a fabulous hobby. The problem is when you die you have no control over who gets what…unless you put it in your will. Some collections can be worth a lot and others are worth peanuts. Last year I cleaned out my in-laws house. It was full of collections. Some went into the rubbish bin while others we managed to sell. When I say sell, I happened to find someone who would do that for us for a percentage of the sale. My father-in-law had asked me to sell certain things and I wanted to be sure to do that for him. The little bottles weren’t worth nearly as much as he’d hoped they’d be worth. Not that he knew as he died before that sale happened. The point is he’d pointed out a couple of collections and asked me to sell them, so I did.
Some things they’d collected over the years I threw straight into the bin. I found a couple of hundred of those little plastic circles from the top of milk bottles. The things that help to keep the milk sealed until you want to drink it. I do regret throwing them out because I found someone who could have used them, but that was about a year later.
What going through their house has made me do is start to reconcile some of my collecting with the fact that someone else will be going through my stuff when I’m gone. I’m now trying to figure out how to make things easier for them. How do I reduce the huge amount of things in this house while still keeping everyone sane? It’s a definite problem. I do have a fear of an empty TBR Pile so I’ve got lots of books there. I will be publishing some videos on my YouTube page some time over the next week or so. Three of them are just my TBR Pile, it seems I talk a lot. I’m sure that doesn’t come out in my writing.
I’m starting to look at my collections. Four years ago I joined a Badge Collectors group on Facebook. I was thinking of selling some of my badges. That eventuated a couple of weeks ago. I ended up talking with the guy in charge of the group and sold him the bulk of my badges. As I seem to be physically unable to throw badges out, and giving them to the op shop is like pulling teeth, he was the better option. I didn’t get much for them because he would be wanting to make his money back in spades. It was a business proposition. I got a little bit of cash and cleared out a shelf in my wardrobe. He got three boxes of badges. One of the ABBA ones is now in the hands of a collector in the Netherlands, while others have gone to other homes.
Going through them to make decisions was awkward. I had, and still have, no idea how many I sold. It was somewhere in the realm of 13 or 15 kg. I forget now. I still want to count them, but how could I do that after the sale? He’d asked for photos, so that’s what I did. I placed them in groups of 40-50 on the table and took a photo. I repeated the process for all of the badges I was letting him have. I’ve got all the photos in Google Drive, at some stage I can go back and count them. I still have some left, some of my originals from the 1970s and some more recent. I was hoping to keep less than 100. I’ll take photos of them one day to make the counting easier.
How does one fall into collecting badges? I’ve really got no idea. I’ve been collecting since the 1970s, I haven’t collected all of that time, I did have a long hiatus, but there was still the pull of collecting. The need to have more and more. I always promised myself I’d look at them some time in the future and then sort them. The reality is that it’s something that never happened. The sorting is now someone else’s problem. When I look at the group I can look with satisfaction knowing that the photos are showing someone else’s badges.
I was an ‘all collector’. There was no rhyme nor reason to my collecting. I didn’t really want the sporting ones, but if they were at the op shop then I bought every single one they had. I bought brand new, I bought pre-loved. For all these years I was collecting with the idea of having multiples so I could swap with people. It was only in the last few years that I considered selling any of them. So many badges….so. many. badges. I’m not even sure I can remember them all, nor even all the categories. Last time I did a guestimate I figured I had about 700. With 48 photos with a varying number of 40-50 in each, I potentially had 2,000 badges. That doesn’t sound right, maybe there were fewer in some photos.
One of the things that made me change my mind about keeping them is the group. People showed their collections, maybe not all of them, some. They also talked about their criteria for collecting. It made me stop and think, because I’d never had a criteria before. I’d never sat down and thought about the ones I liked more. Anyway, I’m going to continue to enjoy looking at other people’s collections. Do you collect anything? Throw me a comment below, I love hearing about other people’s collections.
I do have a dice collection. But that fits into two shoeboxes. The three boxes of badges I sold were bigger than shoeboxes.
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