Day Of Reckoning

However painstakingly compiled, your collection is destined to be broken up and recycled. It’s not a question of if, but when, and how?

- John Crace

There comes a moment in every collector’s life when one’s mortality must be faced. That brings a day of reckoning most of us would rather avoid: the time we have to come clean on just how much we have spent on our hobby.

After all, we wouldn’t want to leave our family a collection which has been lovingly put together at considerable expense but which they imagine to be a load of worthless junk, and promptly hand over to a charity shop.

These are the conversations when pigeons come home to roost. Those dinners out and weekends away that you canceled because you were ‘feeling a little broke’, neglecting to tell anyone that you’d just spent several hundred pounds on a stamp.

Those furtive conversations with your dealer, trying to arrange for a Royal Mail special delivery to arrive when no-one but you is in so that it goes under the radar.