Collecting Masks

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In ancient Greek times, masks were used in theatres. Because masks represent different characters. Different emotions. Masks also represent archetypes.

Masks were used mainly in religious festivals and rites of passage in different cultures. Like shaman masks were used to appease the gods and ancestors for fertility, healing, hunting for food, initiation and crossing over to the spiritual world.

As in the case of Venetian masks and Masquerade ball masks, the purposes of wearing it is to conceal one's true identity in order to have the freedom to flirt and dance with anybody, to negotiate clandestine deals.

Those masks enabled the poor to hobnob with the rich. Ironically, masks are a way into the very nature of our own being.

Mask collectors hunt and accumulate these sculptures because it would lend a three dimensional aspect in their collections. Collectors tend to focus on only one single theme such as Balinese mask s, Noh masks from Japan, opera and rituals masks from China, original movie monster masks, Venetian masks, Masquerade Ball masks, half masks, full masks, head masks, stick masks and Mexican masks that were used to cover corpses as these were put in a canoe and sent out to sea.

Masks can either be hung on the wall or let stand on a base. Undoubtedly, they are outstanding conversational pieces.

Like any other collectibles, masks that are of good quality, in excellent condition and most of all rare, would command a high price value on them. Better still, if the piece is published in books or catalogues, would be worth more.

If it came from prestigious dealers and auctioneers like Sotheby's or Christie's would certainly escalate the price all the more.

You don't have to collect every masks of every tribe in Africa (if African art is your thing). Just concentrate and focus only on one like Gelede masks from the Yoruba of Nigeria or comparable masks from Zaire. It's all up to you.

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Collecting Retro Modern Furniture

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A fashion designer once said that clothing styles orbit in two cycles, seven years and a classic twenty five year cycle. With furniture ,architecture and industrial design the periods are longer.

So while models are trotting the runway with seventies fashion, fifties and sixties interiors has recently made a comeback.

Great fifties and sixties stuff generically known as modern furniture or retro modern furniture.

Retro modern furniture designs were well made, inexpensive, distinctly bright colored with pale woods. It filled young couples' brand new houses during the Eisenhower years.

Fifty or more years later, retro modern furniture expressed the power of American verve and postwar enthusiasm and optimism. Modern furniture designs by Charles and Ray Eames, Nelson George, Noguchi Isamu, Wright Russel etc. made their mark after World War ll.

It's possible now to recapture the best of the fifties and sixties. One of the appeals of the retro modern furniture is that a lot of the wonderful pieces are still being made. Some companies licensed reissues of chairs, sofas, coffeetables etc. to the precise specs of the originals.

Although some materials are already endangered and more expensive (i.e rosewood and goosedown).

Modern furniture stores like Heywood-Wakefield ( i think it's currently under a new name) produced much of the furniture fueling the revival of fifties style. You can also buy modern furniture at auction sites such as ebay or yahoo. Old Hollywood studios still have huge stashes of fifties/sixties pieces mostly used as movie props.

Experts recommend mixing retro modern furniture pieces with new products. You don't have to blow your money on entire vintage pieces. A few really good genuine retro modern furniture can give authenticity to everything.

Buyers and collectors of retro modern furniture who want one of a kind stuff will prefer the hunt that build their collections more slowly, otherwise if you are in a hurry to find the look of the period buy modern furniture in current versions of the classics or reissues.

I remember when i was around five or six years old playing around my grandmother's house surrounded with what is now known as retro modern furniture. I still hear faint bossa nova beat in the background. It feels surreal. I couldn't believe i'll even say this: If only i had all those furniture today.

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Collecting Baseball Cards

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Baseball cards aficionados don't even buy baseball cards that come with bubble gum anymore. And those were innocent times, when buying baseball cards reflected a love for the sport.

Today, buying, selling and trading baseball cards are a big business and i mean huge.

To make your collection more profitable someday, you can focus solely on a single basic theme. Like you might just want to collect rookie cards or serially numbered cards, memorabilia cards, the basic sets, graded baseball cards, star cards or vintage baseball cards etc.

There are a lot of factors that affect the cards' book value such as the player's popularity, the condition of the card (gone are the days of putting them in the spoke of your bike wheels, shoeboxes or binding the baseball cards with rubber band).

Buy baseball cards from manufacturers which are licensed by the leagues. This would assure authenticity. There are indicators such as stickers and holograms to avoid counterfeiting.

Baseball Card Price Guides

Part of the fun and thrill of collecting baseball cards is to flip pages of price guides and check how much your baseball cards worth. The popular ones are the monthly and plus guides from Beckett, Tuffstuff Magazine or go to their respective official websites. Check out as well cardprices.com, vintagecardprices.com and sportslizard.com Don't forget ebay and yahoo auction sites.

Some people have made a living out of buying hundreds of thousands of cards in complete sets and then "breaking out" the players that might be famous someday.

You just have to have the knack, the sixth sense or whatever you might want to call it, to identify or intelligently guess which players at the start of their careers will be future hall of famers. And try to accumulate hundreds of those cards now and hold them until they appreciate.

A decent ROI nothwithstanding, the other reason people collect baseball cards is that they bring them back to a time when they had no worries and when they thought there was no reason why they couldn't be in the big leagues. When they hold those cards in their hands, they reunite them with a part of themselves. How they felt about the players.

I know they are only little cardboard pictures, but they're mighty tangible reminders of every boys' dreams of heroism.

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