Collections - August 14, 2025

This headline item mademe think about collections today

Are you a collector?

A married couple, they died in a car crash in Italy. Mario Paglino and Gianni Grossi, designers who turned Barbie dolls into one-of-a-kind works of art that sold for thousands of dollars, including one that fetched more than $15,000 at a charity auction, died on July 27 in Italy. Mr. Paglino was 52; Mr. Grossi was 54.

Well, I haven't been a collector unless books count. I have thousands of books and have been donating dozens of large containers of books to the Free Books Project over the past 5 years because my eyesight is failing from Fuch's Dystrophy and I can't really read anymore. I am happy for my books to go to those who can read.

Other than books I don't have much in what you could call a 'collection' which is defined as a group of related objects. My daughter did have many Barbi dolls in her childhood and all the accessories including the converible car, the ice cream stand, the hair-dresser's salon, the recording studio, and the bargecue shop, among others. But perhaps her main collections were her Jurrassic Park action figures. She had a dinosaur encyclopedia and all kinds of accessories to that film, lunch box, t-shirts, posters, all that. She also collected American Girl Dolls and has Four of them. I forget their names. Actually almost anything that counts as a collection belongs to my daughter: she has an antique bottle collection given her one piece at a time by her father, probably a couple dozen bottles dug from privies in Northern Liberties in Philadelphia.

I am more of a one-of-a-kind collector. I have one doll from my own childhood, not particularly valuable in terms of cash but she means a lot to me because she was given to me by my Godfather, Neal Schmidt, who was possibly the nicest man I ever knew, kind, gentle, thoughtful and serene.

I gave away my seashell collection to my sister's grandson, and my fossils. For a time, I had an eye for house shaped teapots and I think I have three sets of them. Once, my daughter and I had a tins collection, added to by her vintage/antique buying and selling father, but Lavinia sold or disposed of most of them during a summer when she was getting ready to make her break-for California. She held a sureptious yard sale. I had forbidden it because I didn't want her gathering anything she decided might sell, loading it up out front and then disappearing leaving the remnants on the lawn which was a probably scenario for that period of her life. She held the yard sale when I was away and threw away trash cans of things that didn't sell. I was heartbroken when I saw some things I had given her - a little cupboard with an antique lead cowboy and an Indian to go with teh book The Indian in the Cupboard, for example. I just turned away and let it all go, not the first time in my life I had to make that move.

When I left my ex-husband, I was so exhausted, frightened and overburdened with worry I couldn't carry one more box of my stuff up to my apartment over the Drug Store on Haddon Ave. in Collingswood, so I left my entire collection of first and only edition feminist magazines and books on the curb. I had called some women's groups hoping someone would come to get them but no one was willing and I couldn't carry them up those stairs.

Collecting is an interesting and vauable pursuit, to me. First off, collector's save and conserve material culture for the future. Especially in this 'throw away' culture in which we live, stuff isn't saved, it is disposed of and replaced by new stuff.

I had a '3 Diminsion Art' course in college, taught by sculptor John Giannotti, where he once discussed the future of material culture and furnishings in a time when houses are built without attics. In my childhood most houses had attics and Grandparents and Great-grandparents things were stored there. Attics and chests of the antique and vintage items featured in many novels about treasure maps and shipwrecked ancestors forced into cannibalism. Our modern post World War II lives didn't include attics. Our modern New Jersey Development houses had no attics or basements. Nonetheless, some old family heirlooms managed to survive and float down to me and live with me at present. I have no idea what will become of them because, so far, in our family there is no one remotely like the kind of child I was which is how these objects came to be in my possession; I was that child, the reader, the saver, the Grandmother's girl. I have Sandman/Young Great grandmother's 1929 sewing machine, Merchant-Marine Wright Grandfather's mahogany deck chair, a wing chair in poor condition from my mother's McQuiston side of the family and some fading photographs from 1869. It is impossible for me to say what will become of these refugees from time after I, their conservator, am gone from this world.

I have been divested of my things several times over through divorce and moving. This house where I have lived for 40 years is filled with things which I suspect will have no value to anyone when I am gone, and this is a sad observation I hear all around me from people in my age group who are preparing for the final divestiture. Nobody wants all that old stuff.

I know there are collectors out there who would like to have and to hold many of the interesting items I have but I don't have the interest or motivation to make those arrangments; for example, I have a 1947 German made portable typewriter and an even older 1919 typewriter. The stories they tell from the times when they lives, but I don't feel like looking for homes for them.

Who knows, maybe a day will come when old things will become popular again and it will be easier to find homes for these wonderful things like my Great Grandmother's sewing machine. I can only hope so. Maybe a web site called The Old Curiosity Shop.

Happy Trails

wrightj45@yahoo.com