|
| If you’re reading a book like Hake’s Price
Guide or an e-zine like this one, you’re probably a collector, but have you
ever wondered why that is? Are collectors born or bred? And are we just pursuing a
leisure-time hobby, or are we doing something much more, acting as preservers of the past,
as caretakers of other eras? Let’s look for some answers together... PART ONE: THE POWER OF NOSTALGIA
The answer is deceptively simple. While the process of collecting is often intellectually stimulating, the real motivation lies in the heart. It is pure emotion that drives collectors; we all seek fulfillment in collecting, whether it’s comic books or toys or even original art. We’re searching for things that make us feel whole, and very often they’re the things we left behind as we grew older. The power of nostalgia draws us back to artifacts from our childhood, and we have to possess them and file them away, capturing those moments in time so that no one will ever forget them. It’s our most practical bid for immortality--a chance not only to reclaim youth or an innocence lost, but to insure a seamless continuity from one generation to the next...assuming of course that our children will embrace our past as willingly as they build their own.
Collecting isn’t about age, or even the actual time in which you grew up. Collecting is about a feeling, a passion for the icons of the past--a driving force that requires all collectors to gather the relics of other eras so that their uniqueness and meaning will never be lost even when the people who made and enjoyed them are long gone. At its best, nostalgia not only keeps us connected to our own past, but weaves us into history, bridging the gap between generations and uniting all collectors in a single purpose. What that purpose may be, and the responsibility it entails, will be dealt with later.
|
It’s a daunting task to take on such a grand theme, but we
should ask the question: What makes us collectors, and what is it that draws us all to a
book like 
Nostalgia, however, is powerful enough to insure that. Collecting
represents the desire to recapture the past, and that often includes a past we never
actually experienced. A true collector is capable of appreciating and even loving the
artifacts of an era beyond their actual lifetime as if they were a part of them. A child
of the 1970s and ‘80s like myself may be drawn to collect memorabilia from the
‘60s or even the ‘30s--Star Trek collectibles, Marx Brothers
memorabilia--and feel the same way as he would twenty years later, when the remnants of
his own childhood beckon him to dealers’ tables at some future convention.