Tea Pots and Toby Mugs

Hello everyone! On this week's podcast, we talked a lot about what is considered a collection. When I think of collecting, I always think of my mom. She always told me that everyone needs something to collect. As I grew older, I began to understand what she meant. Everyone does collect something even if they fail to realize it. My grandmother collected bells, my cousin collects snow globes, my coworker collects Pokémon cards, and my boyfriend collects horror movie memorabilia. What drives us to collect things?

When I was little, I was a novice collector of things such as rocks and crystals, pretty coins, and keychains. When I was in the second grade, my cousin gave me one of her old Archie comic books; I was instantly in love and wanted to read more. Every time we were at the grocery store and there was a new digest available, I would ask my mom to buy one for me. Through those newer comics, there were opportunities for me to order some by mail including back issues of my favorites. I loved everything about Archie and the dynamic he had with his friends and the sweet teen romances he had with Betty and Veronica.

In addition to the local bookstore, my mom would take me to vintage comic book stores to see if we could find older Archie editions. A few years later, I collected over 1,000 comics and various pieces of memorabilia. My friend Stacy and I started our own Archie Fan Club and we would read our books together while listening to “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies. It didn’t occur to me that the comics I collected might be worth something someday. I was collecting these books purely for fun.

As I grew older, I began to share my mom’s interest in antiquing, garage sales, and auctions. My mom was an avid collector of vintage Coca-Cola memorabilia herself. She also restored antiques as a hobby and resold them on eBay. It wasn’t until my mid 20’s that I (accidentally) started my antique collection, which evolved into a greater appreciation of the art of collecting.

I was sitting in my grandmother’s living room one day and I was admiring her teapots. They weren’t my grandmother’s teapots but my great-grandmother’s teapots on my grandfather’s side, and they had always sat on the top shelf of my grandmother’s built-in bookshelf. There were eight of them arranged perfectly, and I always noticed them – even when I was a kid. One was gorgeous (to me), and it had golden polka dots. I told her and my mom that I would like to inherit them one day when she was tired of them. At that point, I had been a casual teapot collector. I had a Snoopy teapot and a Cow Jumping Over the Moon teapot that friends had randomly given to me. I liked teapots, but it was the sentimental value of my great-grandmother’s collection that drew me, especially the shiny polka dots on the one that I specifically noticed.

Zodiac Teacup from my collection

Not long after that conversation, my mom took me to one of the monthly auctions in our hometown of Vernon, Texas. It was an estate auction and among the wares was a collection of vintage China teapots. My mom handed me some money and said I could bid on whatever I wanted, so I bid on those teapots and won. That started my strange journey in teapot collecting. While I do appreciate the art of collecting vintage items for resale like my mom did, this collection journey was purely for my decorative pleasure. Over the years, I have collected teapots from the many antique, auction, and thrift store outings with my mom, and I have been gifted teapots. My tastes also evolved from pretty, shiny teapots to weird and unique-looking ones.

Benjamin Franklin Teapot

In 2017, at an estate sale with my mom, I bought my first Toby Head. What is a Toby Head? According to the American Toby Jug Museum (yes, it exists), a Toby is a ceramic head molded in the form of a popular character, historical, fictional, or generic. Tobys do not have a specific manufacturer. Any ceramic head can be considered a Toby. That being said, I like unique Tobys. Since 2017, I have collected a number of Tobys in many forms from teapots to creamer jugs to mugs. My favorite find was a Benjamin Franklin teapot from a shop in McKinney, Texas called  The Groovy Coop. Recently, I found a pair of king and queen mugs on eBay.

Toby teapot and mug

Some of my mini Toby collection

Last year, after my divorce, I made the difficult decision to downsize many of the things that I had inherited or collected over the years, and my teapots and Tobys were not left unscathed. I only kept the ones that gave me a certain amount of pleasure and the very important ones that my mom and I curated. Now I keep the pure pleasure of my collection to a minimum.

So, what drives us to collect? Is it s psychological need to hunt and categorize or is it the pleasure of just having something sentimental? I believe that it’s both. My mom was right. Everyone needs to collect.

I want to hear from our readers. What do you collect and why do you collect it? Head on over to our Facebook Group: MMC Chat and continue the conversation!

*20 years later, my first-edition near-mint “Betty” comic book is worth $165 according to Nostomania.

When a Collection Becomes an Obsession

When does a collection become an obsession? I ask myself that question all the time. At times, I feel like I know the answer, and at other times, I look around me and wonder. I think I worry more about it than most people simply because I grew up with someone who tended to obsess over collections…and not just her own.

My mother was an avid collector of…well everything it seems. Sometimes the collections were cool, or even useful. Like the glass apothecary jars, she would buy at garage sales and the flea market. She had hundreds of them, in every size possible, but they all served a purpose, and they were neatly displayed on shelving in our kitchen. Used as canisters, they held our flour, sugar, cornmeal, tea, coffee, baking soda, and everything else you can think of, right down to the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper. Whenever Mom bought kitchen staples, she carefully dumped the contents of the box, bag, or can into the jars, labeled them, and put them on the shelf in order by size and priority (flour, then sugar, as per tradition) or alphabetically (the spices). I thought it was so cool. I never gave any thought to the idea that it might be an early warning sign of much bigger problems.

My mother was always a bit obsessive about things. If she had a hobby, she was all-in…at least until she got tired of it. She was even known to record a song over and over on both sides of a cassette tape so she could have it on repeat ad nauseam. I couldn’t listen to the theme song from Grease for years after that torture. We laughed about it then; we thought she was just quirky. 

In the podcast this week, we talked about her obsession with buying collectibles. These collections started for herself…Kiss memorabilia, NASCAR gear (especially Rusty Wallace), and shoes. Oh, the shoes! If she found a pair she liked, she would buy them in every color available. The same went for pants and blouses, too. They would all be identical (or nearly so) but in different colors.

Mom also started collecting things for other people. I think I mentioned on the podcast that she started my sister on a black-and-white-spotted cow collection. After a neighbor gave me a few sunflower-themed dishes, she started buying anything with sunflowers on it to give to me. She did the same with piano and music-themed items for my husband. She even turned a vinyl LP album into a clock for him once. I think, in her mind at least, she knew that he is a musician and so he must love all things related to music. That’s the way her brain works.

In more recent years, as we have learned more about autism, we’ve come to understand that many of these traits are indicators of someone who is on the spectrum, and sometimes a harbinger of things to come. Although she has never been formally diagnosed with autism, Mom eventually started showing the tell-tale signs of memory loss and fixation that come with the mental disorder known as dementia, which, like the autism spectrum, isn’t really just one thing, but rather a lot of very similar behaviors and conditions all lumped together in an easy to label box. Part of me wonders if the two are related, or if not, what impact the two conditions have on each other. Mom’s condition deteriorated rapidly after my father and sister died, and with no one keeping her behaviors in check, she was hoarding. I don’t know if autism and dementia are related, but I do know that autism had an effect on her dementia and vice versa. Autism created challenges in communicating with her about dementia, and because she interpreted everything so literally, she had no understanding of nuance or degrees. Everything was black or white…there was no middle ground. Her dementia made it hard to set routines, an invaluable tactic for people on the spectrum. It also made it useless to reason with her, since the reasoning part of her brain is what has been damaged.

Last weekend, we celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday. We all bought her gifts of the things she is currently most obsessed with: word search puzzles, odd and fun pens, and stuffed animals. She has quite a collection of them all, and my family happily acquires them for her. It’s what she would have done for us. Now, I just hope that the things I collect don’t become an obsession. I look around my office, and I wonder….