Can anyone honestly say....

[jgannon]

Originally Posted by Republicaninmass

I feel it's about the journey, not the destination. Why would you finish it and keep it on a shelf to collect dust, or look at it once a year. There is much more joy to life than staring at cards, but building a set can be a nice challenge to occupy some free time.

The journey can still continue after finally acquiring the set, by continuing to experience the joy and the meaning the set or any card or group of cards, continues to give you. Who says you have to keep a collection on a shelf and look at it once a year? The cards are there for you for whenever you want or need them. Using the term "staring" strips the experience of collecting and treasuring cards of whatever inner meaning and joy it has for the collector.

On the flip side (pardon the pun), there are so many cards to collect, I don't think there will ever be a concern about ever running out of things to acquire. But if one is compulsively acquiring and selling what they acquired, I would say that it's unfortunate to sell something that someone really wanted, at least at one point. I can understand that maybe tastes might change, and that someone might really want something else and because of limited funds, sell something that may not seem as important as getting the present thing they really want to get. But for me, everything in my collection has a reason for being there, and it's going to stay there if I have anything to say about it. I made the mistake of giving a huge collection away, when I was looking at things very differently, and also had to sell some really valuable cards because I needed the money. I regret giving the collection away, but don't feel badly about the sales, because even that had a really nice aspect to it. These cards that I had acquired as a kid, because I loved them, were going to help me out now. And they did. Something good came out of something good.

There's a great passage from "The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book" written by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris which I feel captures a lot of what card collecting is all about. It's at the end of the book where they are talking about how "Your mother threw your baseball cards out, right?". The entire passage is so great, and everyone should read it. They commiserate with the poor fellow who doesn't have his cards anymore, and at the end they say, "You knew they were there, and that was enough. Enough to get you through another winter..."

Amen...