The real deal: AmeriCollector is trademarked!

You may have noticed that the little “TM” after our logo is now an “®”: That’s because AmeriCollector is now an official trademark. (A shout-out to our high-profile Los Angeles attorney, Robert L. LegalZoom: Thanks, Bob!)

Getting our commercial creds inspires me to reiterate our Web site’s purpose: to provide interesting and useful information and insights for collectors in all areas, based on the following principles:

1. Collecting is an adventure with a purpose: to learn. It means knowing your collecting area and expanding your knowledge of it through careful acquisition of new pieces. In other words, it’s as much about organization as it about finding and purchasing. It is NOT about compulsive hoarding or mindless buying. (If either the latter is your problem, you need professional help, not this site.)
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2. Collecting is not a hobby just for the wealthy. Anybody can collect: Just adjust your impulses to your financial situation. Sure, I’d love to collect original Gil Evren pinup girls, but my little ones would starve and the bank would take my home after I bought the first painting. Find something that not only ignites your passion but is easy and affordable for you to collect – especially if other people are not after the same thing. (When I was in my early 20s and became seriously interested in first editions, I was advised: Don’t collect Hemingway or you’ll be competing with the big guns; collect someone who other people aren’t. Sage advice.)
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3. Collecting can help young people develop social and professional skills. There’s a reason why the Boy Scouts have awarded merit badges over the years for building collections: It requires focus and enthusiasm and builds character, which serve a young person well on the journey into adulthood and can even lead to a career path. After all, when do you think most high-end dealers in rare cars, coins and other collectibles got started? As kids! Leigh and Leslie Keno, famous for appraising high-end furniture on “Antiques Roadshow,” are always talking about collecting ceramics and other stuff in their prepubescent years, when they probably didn’t know Duncan Phyfe from Barney Fife. Even Warren Buffett collected stamps – then figured out he could make money selling them too. He did OK for himself.
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4. Collectors are a fellowship. Some collectors become dealers, and that’s as it should be: I’m the first to applaud someone who can make an honest buck doing in the field that he or she has loved since childhood. But at some level, it’s not just about the money – at least, it shouldn’t be; otherwise, the uptown Manhattan autograph dealer in his fancy gallery space might just as well be selling sides of beef in the meat district.
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   Call me naïve, but I believe collecting ought to be about making friends and sharing information, offering advice to new collectors and asking advice of old ones. Sure, there are plenty of misfits who don’t play nice – cutthroats who treat all other collectors as arch rivals – just as there are lots of dealers who pull cheap shenanigans when buying or selling, claiming that “business is business.” These are people to avoid not just in the collecting universe but in life in general. However, there are plenty of other collectors and, yes, dealers who consider everyone with a kindred interest to be a companion on the same adventure. (Believe it or not, I have met many of them through eBay.) These are the people we want to showcase, so to speak, on AmeriCollector: the folks who make collecting exciting, fun and rewarding.

Which is what exactly what we at AmeriCollector hope to do: help make collecting rewarding, exciting and fun. To that end, we hope you, the welcome visitor to our Web site, will keep coming back, sending questions, leaving comments and – if you’re inclined to do so – offer advice and tell us about your own collecting adventures.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Welcome to the redesigned AmeriCollector!

“Live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse” – so said small-time mug Nick Romano (played by John Derek) in the 1949 Humphrey Bogart film “Knock on Any Door.”

At AmeriCollector.com, we’d rather move fast, stick around a long time and make a hell of a good-looking collector’s Web site …

If you haven’t visited us in a while and just cruised by, only to think you typed in the wrong URL, that’s because we have a WHOLE NEW LOOK – the artistic and tech-savvy hand of Stephanie Irwin at work.

Stephanie is the other half of this operation – the part that endeavors to make AmeriCollector both eye-popping visually and user-friendly. That means adding all kinds of other functions that we have long been dreaming of, in the hopes that AmeriCollector will be the hippest, most comprehensive, most informative collector’s site around. What kinds of functions? Things like collector classified ads, club notices, message boards, a “What’s it worth?” feature for your own treasures as well as directories and calendars of online auctions and museum exhibits and book signings and shows taking place all over the country – and beyond – listed both geographically and by category. So, no matter where you are, where you go and how long you stay there, you’ll know what’s going on in a whole range of collecting fields.

We’re not there yet, but as anyone who really appreciates the challenges and intricacies of Web design well knows, it’s not just a matter of having lots and lots of useful stuff – it’s organizing it so that you, our visitor, can easily locate the information you want … and designing a beautiful Web site so you can have fun using it.

That’s exactly what Stephanie’s doing, and I don’t doubt for a New York nanosecond that her vision and expertise will win awards before long, for pioneering a model Web site that moves fast, offers lots of options and looks fantastic too.

On the writing and editorial end, we want to add more stories, more book and exhibition and auction reviews, more interviews and collector profiles – and post them more and more often as we get into our stride. And you can help us do that by submitting questions, comments, criticisms, suggestions, story ideas and news items and even, if you have a literary bent, writing for us. Drop us a line and tell us what you have in mind.

To our regulars, thanks for staying with us! To newcomers to our Web site, thanks for stopping by! We hope you’ll visit often and grow with us!

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