Tuesday, June 21, 2011

My full-time hobby.

Everyone collects something. If you lived 100 years ago, you might have collected stamps. If you are an active little kid, you can easily collect bruises, or dirt. Most men collect tools, and some cars. Me? I collect something else: business cards.
This is my collection, minus the ones I have got since I took the photos.
It all started several years ago, actually. My first card was from Magnum Archery, an archery range not too far from us. I decided to collect the cards from the two archery places near us: the above mentioned, and The Bow Shop. Two years ago, our bows were stolen in the night out of our car. We went to an archery place in Benoni to buy new bows (South Africans will know where Benoni is), and I got their card. We also found another place in Centurion, and I soon had their card.
Around that time, I did not plan on a large collection. I was just interested in getting the business cards from all the archery places I knew. But then, sometime later, I started to like the idea of a collection. Until around October last year, I only had seven cards. But that soon changed when we went to a shooting range quite close to us, and they had eight or so different cards there, several from other places than the shop. I took seven (call me greedy if you like), and that was my starting boost. Over time, I collected more and more, and slowly my small bunch grew. But my biggest addition was when in march, my grandmother heard of my hobby, and gave me sixteen cards! It might not sound impressive, but to a starter, all is welcome.
The cards in the left and middle columns are some of the ones my grandmother gave me.
I now have 71 business cards in my collection. They range from The Bow Shop to Umklewu Bushveld Lodge, from For Horse and Country Saddlry to a tree feller, from a private photographer to Pringle of Scotland, from a pet shop to a dentist. When compressed, it is about 3 cm thick. I could never beat the world record, which is 900,000, owned by a boy of 10, so says the ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’ 2010 book. All of mine have been collected, donated, or found honestly, and I hope to increase my number to over a hundred by the end of the year.







This is is one of my latest cards: a card from a Harley Davidson seller.



Since I took these photos, I have got a few more cards, and so they are not in the picture. Thank you for reading.