Design Crafters

Do you spend a lot of time on eBay or at antique shows hunting for that last collectible to round out your collection?  You just might have a collection!  More and more all the time, we see that people have all kinds of collections:  china figurines, photos of elephants, movie memorabilia, circus paraphernalia, anything and everything to do with the Wild West, baseball cards, comic books, you name it, someone out there surely collects it!  One type of collection that has been popular for a very long time has been autographs. 

Autograph collections are an interesting kind of collection to see, as people often have all kinds of things autographed for their collections:  baseball cards, cocktail napkins, inside frontispiece of books, teeshirts, movie posters, photographs, and of course the time-tested favorite:  a scrap of paper.    One man in England who was recently recognized as a world-class autograph collector (he auctioned off his collection for 50,000 pounds!) says he put together his collection by writing to people to ask for their autographs, and many famous people complied, sometimes by postcard, letter, or even Christmas cards. 

Now comes a bit of a surprise:  it’s more than likely that you’re an autograph collector, as well.  Sure, you’ll find that most peoples’ autograph collections generally feature the autographs of famous people (actors, musicians, politicians, religious leaders, to name a few), but there are also some folks do collect the autographs of friends and family.  Don’t believe me?  Well, next time you’re putting away your Christmas decorations and you find yourself saving the stack of Christmas cards that you received, you might just realize that you are, in a way, collecting your family and friends’ autographs!  Years from now you might pull out those stacks of cards and enjoy looking through them to see old familiar handwriting of your grandmother, best friend from college, or your niece when she was in the first grade.