What Makes People Into Collectors? »
When we were kids, we all collected things. Baseball cards and comic books and action figures. But it wasn't collecting. It was just stuff. Okay, maybe we didn't all collect things. Maybe it was just us boys. Frankly, I think that girls collected things too, it was just different. Being that I wasn't one of them, I don't know what it was. I'd be likely to say dolls and ponies and shoes or something. If you knew the right kind of girls - or perhaps the wrong kinds of girls - then they would have collected boys.
But the point is, at the time, we had those things because we enjoyed them (especially those girls I was talking about). At some point along the line, it all changed. Rather than just having things that we liked to have around so we could use them, take them out and play with them - and at this point I'm going to stop talking about those girls - we became collectors. At least some of us did. Here, I'll also probably need to stop including myself in the analogy, because I don't really consider myself a collector of things. This point is where those treasures became objects that we thought might be worth something to people other than ourselves, and that is when our lives became just a little more jaded.
