Blog-stalk Confessions: Autograph phase - 2001-2010...
Sat Jul 10, 2010 11:29:17 pm

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This is long, and fairly pointless. A note to myself, really.

I am, and have always been, a serious collector. The objects of my collections have changed over time, but my immersion in those worlds have always been deep and thorough. When I take interest in a new hobby I take the time to learn all of the interesting things about it, and most of the boring things as well. Since I made my first checklist at age eight, I have always been an organized, somewhat anal collector. I have been fickle though. Very few things that I have enjoyed collecting have stuck with me.

It started with a video game. A local pizza shop had a Ninja Turtles arcade game that I strongly took to. I'd go after school and play a couple of games (though I confess that I've never been especially good at video games, and it actually took me two turns when I started to play to figure out that I was playing as the ninja turtle and not the foot soldier...) and that eventually led to me coming across a ninja turtles comic book at a grocery checkout counter, which took me to a comic shop and my only lifelong hobby. Comic books have stuck with me though my tastes have evolved, as they should, over the years. When I was younger it was all spider man, x-men, ninja turtles, Batman, sonic the hedgehog, gi joe and superman. These days there is still superman and the occasional batman or gi joe, but the rest has been replaced by a plethora of small-print and independent titles that feel more like 'real' literature. And of course there are the funny comics, most online but I enjoy the print versions when they are produced. Along with books and general media, comics are the only thing that has remained a constant on my checklist. (standard media like books, music and movies have been constant as well, but those are obvious...)

Even my comic collection has changed. When I started collecting, the glamorous collection appealed to me. I wanted to own all of the sought after comics that I couldn't afford. Every first appearance and significant issue made its way onto my list. Thanks to a little bit of luck and a lot of careful wheeling and dealing, by the time I was 15 I had built a pretty impressive collection. I was always a master of locating the good deals that other people didn't know about. Over the course of six or so years I turned a hundred dollar comic that I found at a garage sale for fifty cents into a collection that at its largest was worth about fifteen to twenty grand. This would be impossible to repeat nowadays though. With the popularization of eBay and other online selling tools, deals like the ones that allowed me to build such an impressive collection are just much more unlikely nowadays. I remember buying the first appearances of several key marvel characters for about a tenth of their worth. That just doesn't happen anymore.

As I matured, I stopped enjoying the price tags of these books and started focusing on the literary and personal appeal merits of many of these items. They went from being shiny trinkets that I cherished for their price tags to pretty pictures that I could sell for more important things, like rent, food, things I actually wanted to own and dating. So went my precious items, one by one, eventually leaving me with a collection that is worth ten to twenty percent of the old value but infinitely more enjoyable to me than its previous incarnation. The comics have changed, but I still have my detailed checklists and complex filing systems.

In the course of collecting comics, I was inevitably led to collect things that tie in to comics, or even just things that seemed like a good idea. These are my phases. I collected action figures for about three months when I was ten, but then I realized that I'd rather play with them than look at them in their original packaging. I have not collected action figures since. Next up was coins, which seemed like a good idea because I had just read an article about the rare 1943 copper penny and I was determined to find one. I got bored with this hobby fairly quickly. After that I got into stamps for about a year, but lost interest when I realized that they could not be read, and should not be enjoyed by anybody who isn't wearing a tweed jacket and a respirator. Once I got into playing sports, I started collecting sports cards. That interest faded for equal parts of my loss of interest in athletes as role models and when I realized that due to the unlimited varieties of trading cards I'd never get all the cards I wanted. Some of my hobbies were too bizarre to be believed. Do you know how snapple has always printed odd facts under their bottle caps? I collected those for a while.

The temporary interest in sports cards led me to non-sports cards. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these, they are trading cards that feature anything from movies to tv shows or even musicians or comic book characters. I started with Buffy The Vampire Slayer cards and pretty soon had a collection of about fifteen different series, which is more than it sounds like. I stuck with those long after I'd dropped sports cards, because they featured such interesting looks at media I already loved. Plus, there were autograph cards.

This was my first encounter with the world of autographs. Each box of buffy the vampire slayer cards had one autograph card hidden amongst the 36 packs in each box. They were produced by a company called Inkworks, a company that has since folded after a few foolish gambles in licensing rights for movies and shows that didn't quite make it. Inkworks was my favorite card company and one of the few companies I had been very loyal to in my life. They were good people, they believed in their product and in customer satisfaction. They honored expired coupons and replaced any damaged cards that they could without even asking for any sort of proof of purchase or whatnot. Before I veer too far off track, as I realize this entire post has repeatedly done, the point of this is the autograph cards. They would get actors and creators to sign cards, and I absolutely loved these. I loved them so much that I started collecting autographs of people who did not do officially licensed signature cards. I'd mail the actors the cards with a return envelope and would sometimes get them back, other times not. Even when they were returned, you could not always be sure they were real signatures, so I took an interest in authentication. When I was seventeen or so it occurred to me that I live in NYC, and there are tons of tv shows and movies that film here all the time, I figured the best way to be sure that my autographs were real would be to get them in person. So that's what I started to do. After school, and eventually before or after work, I was an autograph hound.

For the first few months of collecting, the only place I went was the Ed Sullivan theater. Letterman always got good guests, so this was a good place to start. My first week included autographs from Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Bruce Willis and Richard Gere. It was a good week, standard case of beginners luck as three of those four names are not always the easiest people to get autographs from. As a matter of fact, I learned that the only reason Tobey Maguire signed autographs that week was because he had appeared on Howard Stern and an autograph collector had called in to berate him for his lack of consideration for his fans. This had him on the defensive for the entire trip in to promote spider man, and he signed autographs whenever cameras were on him. Over the course of those first few months I made new friends, got some advice from people who seemed nice enough, and of course ignored the insults and taunts from the group of autograph dealers who were typical bullies. Dealers care about volume, not about the individual autograph, which means that they are overly aggressive and completely intrusive of personal space when you're all behind barricades. They are not civil or welcoming of new people.

Eventually, as these things go with collectors (and other internets we won't mention...), you fall into a clique. I fell into a bit of a loner clique along with this one other guy. There were other people we each got along with, but when it got down to the good stuff It was the two of us against the world. One jewish kid from Brooklyn and one black guy from Boston, both who were well versed when it came to obscure actors and could spot them from miles away. Over the years we've both made other friends whom we hang out with more frequently than each other, mostly because of my ebbing interest in the hobby, but we each inevitably end up telling stories about our shared exploits to anybody who will listen when we're both in the same place at the same time. He is still an avid collector, out chasing celebrities whenever he gets the chance. The first year of my time as a collector was spent learning the ins and outs of being a good autograph hound. The next few years were spent in a haze of brief encounters with thousands of notable people from various entertainment industries, and the adventures that developed over each encounter. One of my favorite things about autograph collecting was not the celebrities, but the collectors themselves. They dynamics are extremely fascinating. Sociology students could write encyclopedias on the human condition after one year of being a graph hound.


For the past four years I have gone out very infrequently and last night I decided to get rid of my collection altogether. I still have the Buffy collection that started all of this, that won't go anywhere. Neither will my signed books, because authors have the best inscriptions. All of my other celebrity graphs are going to go. I'll sell them on ebay, or maybe craigslist, because they just don't have the shine they once did. As I told the two friends from that world whom I still talk to often, I'll come out every once in a while just to hang out, but I'm probably never getting another non-comic or author autograph ever again. Same for photos with people. They feel empty to me now. I am content with the memories of all the good times we had just fooling around and waiting for celebrities. I remember the celebrities that I've met who have died over the last nine years. The Anna Nicoles, the Heath Ledgers, the John Ritters, Peter Boyles and Mitch Hedbergs... they are distant memories now. I look back fondly on the times my friends and I challenged security and on the times we outraced cars to locations, all the fun things autograph hounds do. But the last time I went out I realized that I just don't want the autographs like I once did. It was almost an arbitrary action on my part. And that's when I know it's time to quit.