Collectors’ Dilemma: Selling the Stories We Once Bought

[DaveA]

I greatly appreciate Turkoman’s comment,

Is is, however, always sad to see the same story repeating itself: under many circumstances, knowledge—whether invented, researched, or documented by a previous owner—disappears along with their name.

This is why I decided very early in my collecting that I would preserve everything I could find out about a specific item in my collection. Jim and Alan and others taught me the important lessons that each item in our collections comes from a certain time, place, in the context of culture, situational factors, and was created by an individual for an individual. It may be regarded and named very differently by people who live in the next village over the hill! This makes every item a personal “viewport” into history, and a story can be made from this.

The story is what sparks the excitement of collectors and others.

Often times we don’t have this exact information about a particular item, but we can still find out quite a bit through study and discussions like these. I applaud the effort by collectors and curators to apply scholarly standards of proof to individual items. I suspect that is too much to expect, in general, from such a small and diverse community. We do what we can.

Final thoughts:
— The EEW forums, archives, articles, and discussions are and will continue to be invaluable resources. They must be secured and preserved.
— More articles, please. We have on EEW world-class experts on topics of interest, but we only learn when they teach. Frankly, I don’t have more than a superficial iinterest in metallurgy, but I do value the articles written for non-specialists about major topics, such as wootz steel, or why many Indonesian blades are so durable.
— Truth in selling! The story helps. It is not necessarily, nor ethical, to embellish it. That said, caveat emptor is good advice.

Sorry for such a long-winded post. If you read this far, wonderful! Than you.

Dave A

P.S. With these lessons in mind, I am redoing and updating my personal collection website, Atkinson-swords.com . I’ve neglected it (for technical reasons) for 8 years and have over 100 collection items to add and a lot more info as well!