A collector’s Christmas
My wife Beng and I are in San Diego, California for our first Christmas in the US in 10 years, visiting our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry. San Diego’s one of those perennially pleasant places where the weather seems to be perfect almost all year round. You don’t come here for a white Christmas—although there’s snow up in the mountains not too far from town. It’s still sunny and warm enough in late December for people to be going around in T-shirts and shorts in the daytime, but for us Pinoys who love to freeze, sweaters and jackets are de rigueur.
We’ve been coming here for 20 years now, and while San Diego is chockfull of attractions—this is, after all, where Comic-Con happens every July (been there, done that twice) and where the waterfront boasts a flotilla of historic ships from a life-size Spanish galleon to the USS Midway —I have to admit that the collector in me loves San Diego for its antique malls, flea markets and thrift shops, of which scores can be found in the city and its suburbs. I’ve found many a prize piece in these places—such as a working gold-plated 1930s Hamilton “Curvex” watch in a basket marked “Any item $5”—which, for me, beats walking into a boutique and plunking down your credit card to pay full price.
I guess I’m a cheapskate at heart, which is why everywhere Beng and I have gone around the world, flea markets and thrift shops—aside from museums—are at the top of our to-do list. The thrill is even less in the purchase itself than in finding something old, beautiful, potentially valuable—and at a bargain.
Collectors everywhere know the feeling—that tingle in your bones and at your fingertips when you step into a shop and scan the territory, and notice something in the hazy distance that seems to look like your obscure object of desire. As a collector of vintage fountain pens, I naturally gravitate toward small tubular shapes in black, silver, or gold—which was how, last March, I spotted and bagged a gold “safety” French-made pen from the early 1900s, sitting all by its lonesome at a table at the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris, a 40-euro find for something easily worth five times as much.
Everyone has his or her strategy, but mine has always been to do a quick march down and around the street or aisle, just to see what’s out there and to catch obvious standouts, before taking a more leisurely and more probing walk back, peering into corners and at the details of particular pieces. It pays to come early—flea markets open as early as 5 a.m.—and we’ve been lucky to bag early-bird bargains at cock’s crow in a barn in Ohio and the flea market at Covent Garden in London.
Unfortunately, flea markets of this sort have yet to become a regular feature of Filipino life, unless we count the Bangkal used-goods market in Makati and the plethora of Japan-surplus stores that have sprung up around the country.
Fortunately, there’s a global flea market that’s accessible to nearly everyone and which doesn’t even require you to fly overseas and deal with visas, airfares, and airports. That market is eBay, which I like to call the great equalizer since anyone with an Internet connection and a bank account can tap into the millions of items that eBay has online at any given second.
To my great wonderment and not a little horror, I realized as I was writing this that I’ve been on eBay for 27 years now, having signed up with the website just three months after it changed its name to eBay from Auction Web in September 1997. My first buy was a 1950s Pelikan 140 fountain pen from Germany, and since then I’ve made almost 2,000 purchases covering all my collecting passions, from pens, typewriters, and Apple computers to antiquarian books, paintings, and clothes. (Clothes? Yes! If you’re a rather large man like me who has difficulty finding his size in local stores, you’ll have lots more choices on eBay for less as long as you’re sure of your shirt, blazer, pants, shoe, and hat sizes.)
Shipping each item to Manila directly from the US or the UK (another eBay paradise) will be too costly, so what I and other experienced collectors do is open an account with a forwarder like ShippingCart or Johnny Air Cargo, which gives you a local address, wait until the items pile up, and then ship them in a box to Manila. (Check with each shipper’s website for their specific insurance and customs policies.) I generally get my goods within two weeks of shipping them out.
I began by mentioning that we were in San Diego because this ties in with another twist to the Pinoy collector’s and shopper’s strategy: if you know you’re going to be in the US and will be staying with a relative or friend, you can have your eBay or Amazon items shipped to that address over, say, the preceding month, and bring everything home with you in the second suitcase you’re entitled to, saving a ton on air freight costs.
This time around, to give you an idea of what my Christmas loot has been, I’ll be filling up a suitcase (or more likely my carry-on) with some small things of little commercial value but of great interest to hopeless hoarders like me. They’ll include:
- A copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from April 1825, in which an article predicts that “It appears that Spain is likely to lose her possessions in the Eastern, as well as the Western world” because of rebellions and crimes in the Philippines as well as at home, including “ravages committed (in Catalonia) by wolves within the last twelve or fifteen months…. The last was a young girl who, on the 18th instant, was almost entirely devoured by the wolves” (which, according to the monks, were “animated by the souls of defunct Constitutionalists”);
- A first American edition of Paul Proust de la Gironiere’s Twenty Years in the Philippine Islands, published in New York in 1854;
- A lovely Art Nouveau rocker ink blotter from around 1915, once used to mop up excess ink from fountain pens; and
- A Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in pearl and black from around 1929, once owned by a “Francis J. Keefe” whose identity will be another mystery to explore.
If Christmas was this bountiful, I can only imagine what the New Year will be like.
