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Posts Tagged ‘collectors’

Meet these incredible collectors of the gags and novelties sold in old comics

Stan and Mardi Timm are serious collectors of Whoopee Cushions, Joy Buzzers, X-Ray Spex, Doggie Doodit, The Ventrilo, stink bombs, squirting flowers, and the other delightful gags and novelties that you might have seen in the back pages of comic books. The Timms are true scholars of these pop culture icons and the companies that ...

Inside a New York garbage collector’s massive personal collection of treasures found in the trash

For more than three decades, New York Sanitation worker Nelson Molina has picked personal treasures from the garbage he collects in East Harlem. Now totaling more than 45,000 cataloged items, Molina has an astounding personal wunderkammer of treasures from the trash. Nicolas Heller profiles him in this wonderful short documentary.

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Thieves attempt to sell off stolen comic book collection… at the victim’s own comic shop

In Saint Louis, thieves broke into Martin Casas's storage locker and snatched his comic book collection. Then they took the comics to a local comic shop to sell them. Thing is, Casas owns the shop. From the Riverfront Times:

...A Chesterfield woman called within days of the storage locker burglary and asked if Apotheosis might ...

Auction: Apollo 11 lunar landing manual that flew to the moon and back

The Apollo 11 Lunar Module Timeline Book was a key onboard reference for the heroic astronauts who made the first moon landing on July 20, 1969. Fifty years later, it'll go up for auction at Christies this summer as part of their sale "One Giant Leap: Celebrating Space Exploration 50 Years after Apollo 11." It's ...

Save the ARC, the largest popular music library in the United States

New York City's ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) is a cultural treasure packed with actual treasures. Inside the walls of this not-for-profit private research library in TriBeCa are 3 million physical audio recordings, many on vinyl records. The ARC's founder, Bob George, is also a cultural treasure -- warm, obsessive, kind, committed, and a ...

A teenage science geek’s quest to collect every element on the periodic table

In the 1960s, when Scientific American copy editor Michael J. Battaglia was 15, he had a chemical romance with the periodic table. In fact, Battaglia was so fascinated by the basic substances of our universe that he tried to collect 'em all (at least the 104 elements that science knew about at the time.) From ...

Reflections on letterhead collecting, with accompanying (gorgeous) samples

Steven Heller calls himself a "letterhead" -- that is, someone who collects letterhead (compare with "Deadhead"); his brief reflections on his passion for Design Observer and interesting and well-observed, but they're not a patch on the actual samples of beautiful, bygone letterhead from his collection.

Letterhead collectors are not a monolithic cult. Each has his ...

Auction for entire series of Supreme skateboard decks expected to hit nearly $1 million

Launched as a NYC skateshop in 1994, streetwear brand Supreme has become a religion for hypbeasts (and the flippers who serve them). Now, a private collector is auctioning off their collection of every single Supreme skate deck ever made. The lot of 248 skateboard decks along with the Louis Vuitton Boite skateboard trunk with tool ...

A modern mudlarker finds treasures washed up on the River Thames banks

In the 18th and 19th centuries, mudlarks were people who sifted through the mud on the banks of the River Thames to find things of value. Ted Sandling keeps the dream alive. He compiled his curious collection in a book, London in Fragments: A Mudlark's Treasures, and you can also follow his finds ...