I collect stuff. I even have collections I didn’t know I had, such as the teacup collection I blogged about in my teacup catalog series.
I collect cameras – primarily Kodak and Polaroid cameras, but also interesting other brands, stereo cameras and viewers, movie cameras and projectors, and books on photography.
I collect books. I will die with a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read. I like adventure, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, along with the odd classic. However, much of my collection is reference material on historical events or technologies. I have a fair collection of turn of the 20th century books on woodworking, design, and science. My wife has a shelf full of old cookbooks and swears she doesn’t want any more.
I collect model trainsets. I have every version of the President’s Choice trains, when they were putting them out annually, except I failed to buy the very first one which nobody seems to know about. It was a very cheap toy train, which at the time I thought not worth having. But then, I didn’t know they were going to produce a dozen good quality sets.
I collect anything I can find about Expo 67. For no real reason, other than I think it was a defining event in Canada’s 20th century experience, and the design appeals to me.
I used to want to open a museum of the 20th century, but that was well beyond my means. In that pursuit, I collected about 45 computers from the Commodore Vic 20, Commodore 64, Radio Shack Color Computer, through to generic desktops and laptops of the late 1990s. I even have a couple of dedicated word processors, and a case of promotional materials dating from the ’70s and ’80s.
I have barely started cataloging my music collection. I have rock, country, and classical music on vinyl, cassette, 8-track, reel-to-reel, and CD. It looks like I have about 600 albums in the various formats.
So, in short, I’m a bit of a collector. And I’m an information technology disaster recovery plan coordinator (I work with techs to create plans to recover data centres in the event of a disaster). And I’m a photographer. I’m passionate about history and the preservation of historic materials and when that fails, of ensuring an adequate record of the material exists (it’s a disaster recovery thing).
If you’d like to read more about me and my qualifications, you can read my introductory blog entry, “Hello world“.
I’m Pete Cramp and you can email me at [email protected], or you can phone me at (705)353-0195. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you within my working hours of 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM EST, Monday through Friday.