Other People’s Collections #BlogHop

I am excited to participate on my first Long and Short Review Wednesday Blog Hop. My name is Shari Elder and I write science fiction and paranormal romance.

I was a pretty boring collector as a child. I had the required stamp and coin collection, but I had no passion for either of them. I did them because they were the thing to do, and I had no other guidance.  Rather, I was fascinated with my father’s collection. He was a big fan of the writer Robert Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian King Kull, Solomon Kane and my favorite, Red Sonja.  My dad collected his books, but of greater interest, his comic books. My dad had a complete collection of all the Conan comic books, starting with number #1. He stored those Conan comics in boxes he lovingly carved and painted. It was by watching him I had come to understand that collecting had to be a passion, not just something you do because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

My other collecting experience was something different altogether. I wanted to raise a global child. My daughter’s name is Heidi. To introduce her to the world and its beauty, I decided to give her a copy of the children’s book, Heidi by Johanna Spyri in a different language every year on her birthday. The really fun part is how I engaged friends, family and colleagues in the collection. I would ask anyone going anywhere for any reason to get a copy of the book in the local language. Each book has an index card tucked inside the cover which says who bought it, where and the relationship of the person to us. We never knew from year to year what language we would get as we depended on finding someone with a plane ticket. We were thrilled at how that worked, and what we got. In addition to the languages you would expect we would have (e.g. German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), we also have Sanskrit, Hungarian, Afrikaans, Korean, Vietnamese, Latvian, Finnish, among many others.  In addition to novels, we also have graphic novels, serialized books, manga and picture books. Here are a few examples. Fun, right?

One thing I learned from this experience was the marriage of planning with luck made it a much more fun experience, because we achieved our goals but with a lot of very pleasant surprises built into it. We were never disappointed.

In addition to your own collecting efforts, what other collections do you know about that you find fascinating?

Thanks for dropping by. You can visit all the other bloggers participating on the blog hop here. I’m looking forward to seeing all the great ideas out there.