Lexington, KY - No matter what they are accumulating, nearly everyone who maintains and curates a thorough collection has one thing in common: they spend a lot of time in basements and attics and garages --
or wherever they have been relegated by their significant other or parents. Collectors, whether they are after antique coins or vintage cars, are always fighting, and in many cases compromising, for more space.
In this issue we have a handful of short features on local collections -- each one is interesting and, definitely, unique in its own right, especially to the collectors, who have spent countless hours building, fixing, finding, cleaning, displaying, growing and even drinking all the items in their collections. It's obvious they've also spent many more hours actually enjoying the fruits of their labor --
not to mention money, which most were too mortified to discuss.
Make no mistake, collectors are not hoarders, although I'm sure some hoarders have some interesting collections. Hoarders just keep stuff --
anything, dirty or clean --
piled up, usually in their living room and on the stove, once the closets and storage spaces are filled to the brim.
Collectors, on the other hand, subscribe to magazines I didn't even know existed, and let their obsessions permeate throughout many aspects of their lives. They know other people collecting the same thing. They belong to local clubs dedicated to items of their passions. They travel to see other collections. They have referential e-mail addresses and bumper stickers that read like inside jokes. They have very compassionate husbands and wives. They have a lot of cool stuff.
I've never been a collector (aside from my comic books and baseball cards as a kid, but I wouldn't call these collections --
a collection is something you take care of), but listening to somebody talk about their collections is like watching a great athlete or listening to a talented musician --
it's mesmerizing. Hopefully this will turn into an annual installment for us, as I'm sure there's many other collectors around town we would all like to read about.
Maybe you could say this is the start of our collection of collectors.
That's always been an interesting notion to me -- the start of a collection. When does a cluster of related objects make the leap from group to collection? I don't know, but from what I've learned from these collectors, there's definitely some form of display case involved.