I’m not sure when I first started collecting sheet music – although the box files of it in my attic study seem (like everything else relating to one of my collecting bugs) to be steadily reproducing – I’ve got a vague memory of starting to amass music at pretty much the same time I […]
The beauty of occasional forays into image collections is that it allows me to bring together material that isn’t linked by any particular theme, other than it’s stuff I’ve collected over the years and like! So it is with this one – random magazines picked up here and there that don’t fit into any […]
I hadn’t intended to build up a collection of Dansettes and other vintage portable record players (I love that term – from when ‘portable’ meant anything that had a handle fixed to it, no matter how heavy). For years, the perfectly serviceable one I had lived in the attic until it re-emerged to give […]
It’s an unwritten rule of any exercise in boyhood nostalgia of the 60s or 70s that Action Man has got to be in there somewhere. And why not? There can’t have been many boys of that era who either didn’t have at least one Action Man of their own or, at the very least, […]
Do you ever have that collector’s dream? You know, the one where you suddenly stumble upon a massive collection of one of the things you love at an affordable price, and you’re torn between the sheer excitement of exploring the haul and a slight panic that you can’t carry it all away. For me, […]
For any collector of recorded music, on whatever format, being given the keys to your own record shop sounds like a dream come true. But what’s it actually like when that dream drops in your lap, and how do you set about making a record shop work without compromising every principle that made the […]
It’s an unwritten law that any nostalgia kick from a boy growing up in the 60s and 70s has to include his unrequited ambition to own a Johnny Seven gun, that multi-purpose piece of juvenile military hardware lauded by Jonathan Ross and indeed out of Christmas wish list range for most of us as […]
It’s somehow fitting that an attraction dubbed ‘The Land of Lost Content’ should sit off the beaten track, and you can’t get much further off than Craven Arms in deepest Shropshire, at the gateway to the Welsh Marches. But a location like that has given Stella Mitchell, a devotee of domestic ephemera, a venue […]
Usually I craft each of these blog posts well in advance of publication, and schedule them so as not to flood the blog with new material each time we’ve been somewhere or when a subject crosses my mind, but sometimes time is just too short. And so it is with the news, spotted on […]
Oops – I appear to have fallen victim to another collecting habit, this time involving vintage cameras from the 1950s and 60s. I put the blame partly on Mr Cad, the rather excellent camera and photography shop near to Victoria Station, whose proprietors tend to fill the front of their window with the stock […]
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