With over 35,000 items, ranging from beer cans to cocktail napkins, matchbook covers to letterheads and many other tchotchkes, the Tavern Trove site provides many happy hours of browsing into the weird niches of the liquor biz.
After the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June, 1968, the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corp. rushed out with a commemmorative, 55-card set of RFK bubble gum cards. It presented "the story of Robert F. Kennedy... with bubble gum."
Kids must have been rushing out to get these.
The cards seem to have appreciated reasonably well in price. Individual cards now range from $3 to $26 in price. You can get an unopened pack for about $65.
Whenever I come across stories about collectors of unusual items, I always wonder what happened to their collection after they died. They went to all that trouble to collect it, and then usually relatives end up tossing it all.
The Extra Miler Club is a group of people whose goal is to visit every county (and equivalent jurisdiction) in every state of the United States. That's 3,143 counties. Indian reservations don't count, although some visit them anyway. Parishes do count, as do independent cities.
If you finish the goal, you're called a "county completer." Only 51 people have joined this elite group, and they're all listed here.
Between the 1930s and 1970s, employees at Merriam-Webster created a massive "backward index." It was a card catalog, containing all the words in its dictionary typed backwards. It eventually included around 315,000 index cards.
The reason for creating this thing was to allow the company to find words with similar endings. Such as all words ending in 'ological'. It also helped them create a rhyming dictionary.
Computers made the backward index obsolete, but it still sits in the basement of the company's headquarters.
In 1994, Jennifer Bornstein appeared on a local LA cable access program that featured ordinary people and their collections. Bornstein showed off her collection of zip-lock bags, coffee bar merchandise, fast-food containers, potato chips, and breath mints. She had carefully framed and archived all of it.
It would have been funnier if it was a genuine collection, but I think it was actually intended as an artistic statement on how "any worthless mass-market products can be turned into coveted objects via absurd relations and vice versa" (according to Kadist.org). So she was essentially pranking the show.
Although she looks quite young in the pictures, Bornstein was at the time a 24-year-old grad student at UCLA. And she's still an LA-based artist.
November 1999: After filing for divorce, Frances and Harold Mountain proved unable to agree on how to split up their Beanie Baby collection. So Family Court Judge Gerald Hardcastle instructed them to bring the entire collection into the courtroom, spread them out on the floor, and pick one each until they were gone.
The judge remarked, "This isn't about toys. It's about control. Because you folks can't solve it, it takes the services of a District Court judge, a bailiff and a court reporter."
Frances Mountain said, "I don't agree with the judge's decision to do this. It's ridiculous and embarrassing." Nevertheless, she got down on her hands and knees and started picking out Beanie Babies.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.