In the digital age, physical collections offer meaningful ways of connecting | Canada Voices

It started with a gift. In 1968, Wyatt Bond and his little brother, Warren, received Hot Wheels Indy Eagle racers from their grandmother, one green and one red. Within a week, both brothers had lost the toys, but would hold onto their affection for cars and for Hot Wheels.

Today, Bond – a former race car driver and mechanic from Kentville, N.S. – has a Hot Wheels collection of around 70,000 toy cars, by his estimate. It includes a number of rare and interesting models including a famous Ferrari with four R’s, one of only a handful in the world, according to Bond.

Thousands of the cars are lined up in glass cases in his home, which has become a local museum of sorts, the collection a tribute to a life devoted to cars. Bond loves collecting, but equally loves witnessing the joy of others experiencing his collection, too.

After retiring as a race car driver, Bond began organizing charitable giveaways in the local community with Hot Wheels toys as giveaway prizes. The leftover cars formed the basis of his collection, which grew as Bond browsed eBay and started connecting with sellers from all over the world. The retail site even gave Bond an award for his prolific selling.

He relies on people to strengthen his collection. “It’s fun to work with people you trust,” Bond says. “It’s a social world.”

Physical collecting is often thought of as a hobby where you garner items that appreciate in value over time. Depending on the item, its resale price could lead to a tidy profit down the line. But for many collectors, the act of collecting is about fostering a separate place for community and connecting beyond work or home.

“It’s a third place,” says Meg McNabb, a 39-year-old publicist and Barbie and Mattel doll collector from Toronto. Collecting becomes part of a community thread, she explains, and a way to bring a person into society.

McNabb has around 40 Barbie and Mattel dolls. Her collection began as a child, starting with the Rosie O’Donnell Barbie because O’Donnell taught her “it was okay to be funny, and not just to be a funny girl, but to be a funny person.” A child of the robust pop culture era that was the late ’90s to early 2000s, McNabb’s collection includes Princess Diana, the cast of 90210, Spice Girls, Josie and the Pussycats and MC Hammer.

“Obviously, a part of [collecting] is nostalgia and recapturing [my] youth,” McNabb says. But, she continues, “I love the journey of, ‘Well, I’ve never been to this area of [Toronto,] and this Sunday I’m getting on a bus for an hour to go to pick up Barbies.’”

Jamie McDougall is an antiques and vintages dealer from Kitchener, Ont. With nearly four decades of experience working with collectors, McDougall has garnered an incredible wealth of knowledge about the pastime. He says he has sold, bought and rummaged through nearly everything and admits he would source 18 hours a day if he could.

He has witnessed some decline in traffic at marketplaces over the years, but he says there is still a sizable, dedicated collector crowd. He sees people young and old frequent Aberfoyle Antique Market, which claims the title of Canada’s oldest Sunday antique market, where McDougall sells oddities and curiosities such as turn-of-the-century Ouija boards.

“The difference between a young person [collecting] and, let’s say, a Gen Xer, is when they buy something they often want it to have a use,” he explains. “They want to listen to vinyl. They want to play a video game. They want to look at their Pokemon cards and think about playing it. A lot of older people collect things to have a collection, and younger people collect things to have something useful in their homes, and also if something tells a really neat story.”

These days, for example, Gen Z is into collecting 4K Blu-Ray DVDs and vinyl. When pop stars regularly roll out multiple versions of limited edition records, it can inspire investment in a larger collection.

While certain items will steadily rise in value and others will suddenly skyrocket, there are also collections whose value is entirely sentimental, used to prompt reflection and connection for the collector. Allie Klar’s moist towelette collection falls in the latter camp.

At first perplexing to others, the collection is a lifelong exercise in memory-keeping for Klar, as well as a way of creating community. Over nearly 20 years, her hobby of collecting moist towelettes – which she first started tossing into her bag as a teenager, and over time the act went from habit to intentional collection – has grown to include friends-of-friends stuffing their backpacks in China, Italy or South Africa to bring them home to Klar.

Klar’s collection is a map of memories she didn’t intend to create but nonetheless feels tethered to now. Each moist towelette comes with a story of an adventure or experience, a special milestone trip or the journey where two people fell in love – not just her memories, but those of each person who has contributed to the collection something otherwise would have been tossed away.

“I like that there’s no monetary value. It doesn’t put pressure on anybody to spend money because it’s tied to whatever they’re doing organically,” Klar says. “When you’re collecting something like coins or stamps, there’s sometimes an end to it. Here… you don’t even know where you’re going to find [moist towelettes.] You can’t go out and seek it. It has to happen in a natural and organic way.”

For each of these collectors, collecting is about preservation, keeping stories and memories alive to put on display.

Thanks to his enduring Hot Wheels collection, Bond has never forgotten those first cars that started it all. That made it all the more special when, five years ago, he was in the backyard of the house he grew up in, putting patio stones out for his mother, and he found a hard ball of dirt.

He knocked the dirt apart and out tumbled the two Hot Wheels racers the brothers lost all those years ago.