I’m now over 60, and all my life I have kept photos, work papers, business papers, school papers, notebooks, and other scraps of paper or memorabilia that I have never learned how to throw away. Then I had kids, and kept most everything of theirs, too.
Also, my wife of 40 years is about the same, so you can just about double whatever you are imagining in terms of space taken up by these habits.
But I also can’t throw a book away, which is not usually a problem, except that I have found ways to pick up books by the thousands, quite literally, through library sales, book hunting vacations, and numerous other book collecting escapades over the last 50 years.
On top of all this, I once did the unthinkable. While working in Manhattan, from a 50th floor corner office in a 70 story building overlooking Central Park on my north and the Hudson River straight ahead of me, I often walked down to 34th street Penn Station every evening around 5:30 on my way back home. Unrelated to my work for an international financial corporation, I would stop in at A&S used magazine store and browse some old Life magazines, Time magazines, and any of 100 other titles that went back to the 1930s, 1940’s, etc.
Log story short, I found a way to supplement my income on many of these stops to the store. No one else had yet seemed to discover that certain old Vogue, Cosmo, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazines were going for $50 to $100 on eBay if they had certain issues of Brooke Shields, Gia Carangi, and early pictures of other famous supermodels.
I could buy 100 worth of Cosmopolitan magazines and sell them for $100 each. And I would do this every few weeks.
But then the Twin Towers of the WTC fell on 9-11-2001, and the store said they were going out of business. and they were going to auction the contents in a few weeks. I decided to buy the store. Not really buy it, but I would bid for old Time and Life, and bid for old Colliers, and Cosmo, and Elle, and Vogue. Prices had slowly been going up to meet eBay seller prices, but now the auction might make them low again.
I spent about a couple of thousand dollars at the auction, and another few hundred for a truck and some help unloading a couple of trips, and another 200 for clipping someone’s mirror, on one of the trips. I unloaded the crates in my den and garage, and slowly spread them around the attic, basement, garage, and squeezed them into every crevice and closet.
This was a big mistake. My 3 kids and wife realized that I really had issues. We had a 5 bedroom house, and one had been turned into an office. Every room, even the bedrooms, suffered to some extent. And so did my wife and kids.
I’ll blame it on PTSD from watching the Towers fall, and wondering what trajectory my career path might take. But there must also be some of the age old packrat syndrome in there, too. I had already been collecting books remember, even before this WTC tragedy hit.
Over time the $2,000 turned into about $80,000. That would have been great had I been able to do this in one year, but it took 20 years. It’s now that I’m retired that I can finally start looking at how I will move all of these down to a manageable amount.
I got this site in order to help me sell off a portion of them by attracting more attention to the ebay stores in which I have been selling them slowly.
