What do you collect (other than boardgames)?

tomm_archer · 25 July 2020 09:59

I’ve just acquired and hung a fourth poster by the same band in my living room and now it feels like a small gallery. I guess that constitutes a collection so here it is:

It started at a Murder by Death gig I went to back in 2010. I’ll let them describe themselves:

MBD makes music for people who like eerie, old things. Things of wood and metal, fire and smoke. They try to subtly reinvent the sounds of Americana and rock without making tired copies of old songs.

They collaborate with local comic book artists to create some absolutely stunning posters. I happened to get the above signed by the entire band after the gig.

Moving forward a few years to the second time I managed to catch them in the UK (2013). They sing a lot of songs about whiskey and death so this poster is particularly on-brand.

The band’s most recent album is a space-western set on a dying Earth. Alongside the album they released this poster which ticks a lot of boxes for me, I couldn’t refuse. (I now notice that this is a bit wonky in the frame.)

This year the band were due to celebrate their 20th Anniversary, but the “current situation” had something to say about that. Facing no revenue from touring this year the band released some limited posters. This one has a little secret:

So there we have it, my small collection of art. At some point I may re-post my badge and vinyl collections, but you’ve probably seen those before.

Captbnut · 25 July 2020 10:23

Those posters are excellent, I especially like the top one.

whswhs · 25 July 2020 10:57

I don’t know if “collect” is the right word for our library. We have over 100 shelf feet of books, but we get them to read (or to look things up in). Does that count as collecting?

We have more art than we can possibly display, the great majority of it bought at science fiction conventions. Now that we have more wall space and a less tight budget I’m having a few more pieces framed so that we can hang more of it up. I’m thinking about putting up two portraits of Neil Gaiman’s Death, a black and white drawing and a painting in the style of Gustav Klimt, more or less side by side . . .

KIR2 · 25 July 2020 15:54

Oh god, I have so many Pearl Jam posters. Should probably take photos some time!

EDIT:

OKAY PEOPLE

My gig posters (part 1)

This was the second & third time I had seen the band (the first time was a promo show at the Astoria in London, so no poster). We flew back from Dublin grabbed our stuff and went straight to Reading.

Dusseldorf. No cool story here. The first show I went to where there was a coveted poster that fetches big bucks in the community. I enjoyed Dusseldorf Aquazoo immensely.

This was the first Pearl Jam show in Denmark since the Roskilde 2000 incident where nine fans tragically died during their set. The band invited the families. There was a very strange vibe to the show - it was clear the band were nervous and rushed a few songs - but very emotional.

This was Katowice, Poland. It was cheaper to fly to Poland and go to this show than it was to go to the London show, so we thought why not? We spent maybe 10 hours total in Poland between flights. In that time we only found one polish person who spoke English, and their first comment was “Why the hell did you come here?”. Good times.

This show actually didn’t sell that well, so the promoters decided to advertise as many completely different bands as possible to try and pull in completely different audiences. So we had a Polish metal band, then Linkin Park (ostensibly as ‘co-headliner’, but clearly as a support act with a slightly shorter set), then Pearl Jam. The band had to cut the show early because of flight regulations meant they had to be in the air before such and such a time. They gave the angriest encore I’ve ever seen becaise they didn’t want to leave. Strange strange show.

And this is an Idlewild poster. From when they played all (at the time) 6 of their albums across three shows at Dingwalls in London, including the premiere of their 6th album. Two albums a night, with an encore of requests. Got poster #1, and was cheeky enough to ask the drummer if he could take the poster backstage for everyone to sign (a few of the band are famously adverse to speaking to fans). If the band were popular, this would probably be worth something! It was an amazing run of shows. Not the most amazing poster in the world, but the autographs strangely balance it out a bit.

That’s everything I have framed. I have a bunch more in poster tubes. Really need to get them framed sometime. One I had to throw out because the mice got to it, but thankfully that was the one Pearl Jam poster I had that was from a show I hadn’t attended so no great emotional loss.

tomm_archer · 25 July 2020 16:19

I think as a build up to those shows they stopped off in Derby and performed some oldies and rarities. That’s the only time I’ve seen them live.

WolfeRJ · 26 July 2020 01:23

If serious curation is the principal criteria then it’s comic books for me.

I’ve got 37 short boxes bagged and boarded and a couple of stacks yet to bag and board. I ditched long boxes after my last move because they are unwieldy and difficult to find what I want.

I keep a couple of lists of old series I want to finish runs of and I usually put my mad money budget to those lists four months out of every 12. Those lists are principally runs I would have read if I’d known about them when they came out or runs I stopped buying from earlier budget constraints. It’s mostly super hero comics from marvel in the 70’s and DC in the 90’s. I’m not particularly high brow but it delivers the endorphins reliably.

I read what I have and I don’t worry about grading particularly. I’ve done three big purges of books I had and thought I wouldn’t read again and I’ve only regretted about 5% of what I purged. Basically all of those got handed off to friends who showed an interest.

I’m buying very little current published items but I keep an eye on it and recently subscribed to marvel unlimited.

optimuspyro · 26 July 2020 20:01

I’m a former collector of Transformer toys. Warhammer is my other main vice, but that’s been put in the past as well. Pretty much only board games these days.

bengeile · 27 July 2020 04:39

Welcome to the forums, and excellent username!
Transformers was my collection of choice for a long time. I hauled boxes of them around for years. Several years ago, some neighbors got evicted during the holidays, with two boys, 6 and 8 at the time. They were going to be couch surfing with family indefinitely, and gifts were going to be hard to manage. I hadn’t looked at my collection since we’d moved to the neighborhood, so I pulled out my two favorites (RotF Optimus Prime and Jetfire) and snuck the rest onto their moving truck, with a note from Santa, along with some suggestions of YouTube videos to help with the transformations. I doubt I’ll ever know how they were received, but I hold out a lot of hope that they went full Toy Story and took good care of those boys.

Now my son is 6, and has been begging me for Earthrise Skorponok for weeeeeeeeeeks.

SteveB_uk · 27 July 2020 09:51

I like the statement I saw on twitter recently where someone said that they think Buying Books and Reading Books are two entirely separate hobbies

I’m very good at the first one, but falling behind on the second.

RogerBW · 27 July 2020 09:57

There’s a word for it in Japanese, from 1879: tsundoku.

SteveB_uk · 27 July 2020 10:19

Ah, I’d heard it specifically applied to piles of books stacked on other books around the house, which I think is a brilliant image.

Griffster77 · 27 July 2020 10:28

This is the headboard of our bed. Not all that long ago, it used to just have 6 neat floating shelves on the wall, holding some of our favourites…

SteveB_uk · 27 July 2020 10:37

whswhs · 27 July 2020 11:01

At the moment we have that with video discs. We have a little queue awaiting times when we feel like watching something movie length and don’t get distracted by streaming something . . .

bruitist · 27 July 2020 11:18

I’m currently in the process of organising our book collection. Unfortunately it stalled because I ordered more books …

This is the problem with finally reading more books - those books have sequels I now need!

whswhs · 27 July 2020 11:21

That’s not an obstacle for me. Fiction is alpha by author; graphic novels are alpha by title; nonfiction is Library of Congress. There’s a predefined place for nearly everything (though we have half a dozen small art books that don’t have Library of Congress access numbers).

SteveB_uk · 27 July 2020 11:26

Going to have to admit that (after writing some books on divination) I now collect dice and playing cards. I was in denial about this for a while

It’s not about having 100 dice for gaming, more collecting individual beautiful objects. Here’s one made out of amber:

And Playing Cards now have a huge range of gorgeous art in a way they didn’t even a few decades ago:

Here’s me researching the history of playing cards in the British Museum, which is a totally normal thing to do. I love the fact that court cards used to have feet, until (about 200 years after this really should have been noticed) people realised they were turning the cards the right way up as they held them, which they didn’t do with pip cards, giving away that they had a good hand!

(If you want a deck with the feet which looks like the English style on that page, I recommend the Highlanders deck - even though it’s technically an 1864 poker deck: Highlanders 1864 Reproduction Playing Cards USGS – PlayingCardDecks.com )

And while I have a few conventional card decks, here’s a replica of a weirder one: “Cries of London” from 1754. It features the real street sellers of that year, yelling things like BUY MY EELS, and the meta brilliance of the Six of Hearts showing someone auctioning nine copies of this deck because it’s obviously such a trendy item.

And then there’s world cards which are different from the western playing card deck, like Japanese Hanafuda cards (one company which started making handmade Hanafuda cards in 1889 was a little one you may have heard of called ‘Nintendo’).

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Anyway, yeah, books are probably the item I have the most of, but dice and playing cards are catching up. Because I needed more things to buy. (My board game collection is tiny by comparison, but the wishlist is long).

Captbnut · 27 July 2020 11:31

My son to be 13 year old collects cards. He’s very good with magic tricks and likes cards he can manipulate. Bicycle are his favourites at the moment. IIRC Quinns collects decks of cards.

Books in our house are arranged - cook books in the kitchen. Other books, other places. I try to keep my cricket books together, but there are so many different sizes it doesn’t work. Same with author - once you get a mix of hard- and paperback they don’t fit on the same shelf.

bruitist · 27 July 2020 11:34

The problem is not knowing how much space the new books are going to take up. I could guess width-wise, but the shelves for paperback fiction are unevenly sized, so some taller books have to be shifted to the hardback shelves (not to mention the addition of books means the positions of these outsized books could move them to shelves that could accommodate them).

whswhs · 27 July 2020 11:53

Ah. I made sure to buy a new set of shelves where all the shelves could be spaced to accommodate one row of books upright behind another row of books with the spines up. The shelves we had before the move could do that, and I measured book sizes before picking out a new set of shelves.