Some people collect stamps or trading cards, some collect other obscurities and some don’t collect anything.
Collections can be sentimental, others are functional, while some don’t have explainable reasons. And thus it prompts the age-old question that arises when we encounter someone with a consistent, intentional collection of specific items; why do people collect things?
Some St. Thomas University students are among the crowd of people with unique collections, such as Izzy Joudry, who has a running collection of ticket stubs kept from the movies she goes to see in theatres.
Approximately six years in the making, Joudry began her collection in high school as decorations for her mirror. She writes the names of those she attended the movies on the stub with if she remembers. This continued until 2021 when she saw Spider Man: No Way Home with her father and kept the ticket in her phone case.
“I think when you go to see the movies, you remember the movie,” Joudry explained. “But when I go to the movies, I’m personally a movie-talker, not really a watcher and I always like to remember the good time we had going there … embracing it as a good time and a good memory with your friends or your family, whoever you went with.”
Joudry keeps many of the tickets in a cardboard box with other assorted “knick-knacks,” while also storing some of higher significance in her phone case, such as the Spider Man movies that she is an avid fan of.
Next for her collection, she is looking forward to seeing the upcoming Paddington in Peru movie in February and acquiring the ticket stub.
“[My collection] is a good way to remember family and friends … it’s less about the thing that you’re doing, but the whole experience.”
One experience Joudry fondly recalled was seeing Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour in theatres with her younger cousin.
“Because I [can] see the ticket, I remember her going and she was so excited … Seeing that reminds me of her joy, which brings me happiness. So I think these movie [tickets] just remind me of really good memories.”
While Joudry’s reason for collecting is to safeguard her favourite memories, she recognized that there are many different motivators to keeping a collection.
“I think another reason why people collect things is simply because they have a really big interest, or they think they’re cool. And it just kind of defines part of who they are,” she said.
The latter is true for fourth-year student Maya Buchanan, who collects CDs.
For the past two years, Buchanan has been collecting CDs for the disbanded rock group Magna-Fi, previously known as The Szuters, whom she discovered upon hearing their music in the Sonic the Hedgehog video games.
“[Previously] I would listen to music in passing like, ‘Oh, I like this song, whatever.’ But I never was a hardcore fan of anyone. So when I finally listened to them, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love these guys, who are they?’”
Buchanan searched the internet for more of the band’s music, which led to discovering their obscure history.
“Not a lot of people have uploaded too much of them, they have a lot of songs that have not been recorded,” she said. “So, I would go on YouTube and look at people’s uploads of demos that some people got sent by the drummer of the band, [or other] really weird ways of getting some of the unknown songs out.”
It was then that Buchanan began looking for old CDs of Magna-Fi’s music on eBay, Amazon Japan and other various corners of the internet. Due to the rarity of the items, such as an album that only had 100 CDs produced, Buchanan has acquired a small but mighty collection.
She believes that in the digital age where media can get lost more easily, it is more important than ever to invest in physical art.
“It was just nice to have something on my shelf that I could look at and say, ‘This is my CD.’”
While Buchanan recognizes that collections can often be a product of consumerism, citing the Stanley Cups frenzy as an example, she also finds value in collecting.
“If we look at it in a different way I think it’s more of a way to express yourself … and to show others your interests.”
