When You Run Out Of Room In Your Albums

I thought this was worthy of posting.
I wonder if the stamps are worth more than the car?

I suppose this is de-coupe-age?

It's so much easier if you have money, as this extract from a 1994 interview with the doyen of UK card collectors, sometime mining executive and spy Edward Wharton-Tigar, shows:

"I bought the house next door a while back to store my card collection. Most of them are cigarette cards and they took up two whole rooms from floor to ceiling in my first house. They were beginning to get in the way a little, so I spent £50,000 to have somewhere to keep them.

I have over a million of them. I've been at it since 1917. They're worth between £2m and £3m, and good God, no, I would never sell them. I started collecting them when I was four. My father, who was a heavy smoker, gave me my first card. I'm 81 now, so that makes 77 years of collecting. One doesn't really understand what one has embarked on at that age. It isn't till one is about 12 that one becomes consumed by it.

I got myself into serious trouble as a child with my collectors' mania. I swopped my mother's valuable stamp collection for what was then a worthless cigarette card collection. I used to collect lots of other things as well, like birds eggs.

I retired from my job as managing director of a mining company 10 years ago and since then I've spent from eight o'clock in the morning till about midnight on my collection. Sometimes my wife and I go to our cottage in the country, because she's got a few sheep down there, but I always, always take a batch of my cards with me, to work on them. I do try to lead a normal life though, inviting friends and things, but I think about my collection a lot.

My wife tolerates what I do, but she does grumble a bit I suppose, because she's really not interested in it. But it's really such an intriguing way to spend one's life. If I dropped dead tomorrow I would feel I had completed something. Or at least almost completed it. One is never totally finished in this business, is one? I'd say, apart from my marriage, my cards are the most important thing in my life."

(Left to the British Museum. The £2-3m estimate is way under - another copy of one individual card in the collection sold for $2m+.)

All I have to say is WOW! to BOTH of those stories! Fun read in the early morning though!

Once you get past 50 you wake up depressingly early!

I suggested to a friend that I could cover her car with my duplicated stamps. She was interested on the basis that she could then claim that it was an album, and thus not liable for car tax!