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A Collector at Heart?

I have been a collector of sorts, as long as I can remember. When I was 6 years old, I collected pop bottle caps. I had lots of them.

The next year, I collected buffalo nickles. You still got them occasionally as change, but I could see they were less common than the Jefferson kind. I saved all the ones that I got and my father's friends would give me more. Soon, I had so many that I gave in to greed and spent them.

I moved on to stamps. I soaked stamps off of envelopes and mounted them in albums. I decided to specialize in U.S. stamps and began using my allowance to buy blocks of the new commemorative stamps that were coming out in the late 50's and early 60's. When the Post Office began bringing them out so fast that I couldn't keep up...I gave up.

I had comics-they got left in Utah when we moved, I had baseball cards from chewing gum. Back then, kids traded them back and forth and used them to make motorbike noises in their bicycle spokes. No one paid money for them. I lost interest in them and gave them to my friends.

What am I trying to say?

I guess I am a collector. But, when I realized that you could go to a store and buy as many stamps...comics...sports cards...as you wanted as long as you had enough money, I was discouraged. I realized that the fun of collecting for me, was not in how valuable the collection was, but came from the search.

Further, I felt that collecting things which were made primarily for collectors to purchase, was to be manipulated into spending money on a futile quest which mainly benefitted the dealers and the makers.

So...finally getting to the point

I once was a National Park Ranger, part-time and seasonally when I was in school. The National Parks have always interested me, both as adventurous places to visit, and as a concept. I had a few old brochures from the 1930's that my wife Sally's family had saved. I began looking for more.

I added brochures as I found them, in old bookstores, in friends' garages, from thrift shops...park pamphlets are where you find them.

While I save the brochures that I get from visiting parks now, and I have quite a few contemporary brochures in my collection, the main thrust of my collecting is to obtain the pamphlets and other publications about National Park Service sites published up to 1972, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the first National Park, (which was Yellowstone).

National Park Brochures appeal to me on three levels

1. As I said, The National Park Service and the parks are interesting to me, and these booklets have a lot of geography, biology, geology and history in them.
2. They are relatively cheap. They cost from $ .25 to a few dollars. Only the oldest pamphlets from the more exclusive bookstores cost more than $10.00 and I pass on those.
3. They weren't made for collecting; they were made for visitors to the park to read and use. Of the thousands of each one that were printed, only a few survive. Finding those survivors is the challenge.

I have put a fairly complete list of the brochures in my collection, here on my web site. It is about 80k so it takes a little bit of time to load, but If you want to take a look...this is my Park Brochure List.