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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

If you are in a niche, plan to get rid of it BEFORE you get old. Please, there are collectors, and stuff!

I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time.

My father, a prodigious collector of oddities has done several wholsale removals of collections.

One comes to mind in parcticular - every single novel, novella, newspaper clipping and piece of paper of "E Phillip Oppenheim", a turn of the century paperback novelist who wrote hundreds of books and stories. Some guy drove out, gave him a nominal amount (a pittance for all the work done), but another avid collector.

Somewhere Indiana Jones of the paperback detective world is screaming "This belongs in a museum!"

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> This belongs in a museum!

Gotta feel sorry for curators.

Curators wish to save things in museums and are surely the epitome of hoarders, for whom almost anything can be valuable, but however who can’t even accept extremely valuable collections because the museum is already bursting at the seams. And proper curation takes, time, effort and resources.

Imagine turning down the collection of someone and rending a hole in their heart and putting tears in their eyes: decades of a collector’s loving care for their particular interest, for a bunch of stuff the museum just can’t accept.

>I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time.

They'll keep you going until you get a "real" toolbox (just like he did) at which point they will be relegated to holding your assortment of flare fittings or electrical connectors or something and then 40yr later when that stuff too is in a cabinet and the boxes has sat empty for 20yr you'll give it to your neighbor who'll say "wow this thing must be well made, look how long it's lasted" when in reality it only has like 5-10yr of being used for tools on it.

It’s really not that simple. My grandfather had almost a year to find people. Almost everyone he’d known was dead. The others already had too many of the things and were in the same situation.

Chemo stopped him from putting more work into finding people.

There are hobbyist groups for just about anything, but they can be small and hard to find. I’m twenty years, I’m sure there would be three people somewhere who would want the reMarkable I have now, but I’d have no way of reaching those people.

This is sage advice for non-collectors too. My parents had the good sense to hold an estate sale before they downsized and moved in with a relative, they knew that it’s a massive burden to leave children with a house full of unwanted things and I’m grateful for their pragmatism. Of course the real treasures, things that have been in the family for generations, they held on to.

> "This belongs in a museum!"

Does it? A museum for who?

I've gone to my share of oddball museums.

In my father's case, a railway historical society :/

I tried to dump as much as possible so they didn't have to spend too much time on it. It took a long time.

My colleagues at work were happy to take various bits such as pandrol clips.

my first Saab i bought was from a guy who ran worked at NASA and in his later life contributed to a rail museum near Hagerstown. I have his original title which bore the NASA Bank as the lender. Very cool stuff! Looked it up and he worked on most of the missions you've heard of today.

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