What Makes a Collection Valuable?

Tips on how to get started and how to avoid costly mistakes.

BY JOE BILLS

ollecting is among our most basic human instincts. Whether we intentionally set out to or not, most of us collect something. Karen Keane knows this better than most: Now the CEO of one of the

Collect What Speaks to You

If you’re just starting a collection, potential value can be an important consideration, but Keane says the best place to start is by collecting what interests you. If your collection flows organically from you, you’ll enjoy building it, regardless of price range or market value.

Become a Connoisseur

“People often ask about ibles. Then we all stopped throwing them away and started treating them like investments. “With baseball cards, it used to be that you could find a collection put together in the 1940s with some spiffy cards, or even better, you might find cards from the turn of the last century,” Keane notes. “Now what we usually see are boxed sets, never opened, from the 1980s. There’s so much of it, and nobody cares.”

“Limited Edition” Equals Limited Value

“I would caution people about getting caught up in the frenzy of objects that are made as ‘limited editions,’” Keane advises. “Rarity is one of the things that you need to consider when valuing a collection. If whatever you’re collecting is too easy to acquire, be aware that you may be going down a rabbit hole after something that will never be terribly valuable. Products that are designed as collectibles just don’t go anywhere. You can rarely get your money back.”

The Generation Gap

Certain classics may never go out of style, but tastes change. “As the Baby Boomers age out of the marketplace,” Keane says, “we’re looking to see who’s going to fill their shoes. What is this generation interested in?” Furniture from the 1970s, she notes, is at a price point where a younger person can afford it, “and their aesthetics are a little more open-minded. They’re still looking at things. To me, that 1970s sofa is just as legitimate as an Empire mahogany scroll-arm settee from 1820. It speaks to its time, it’s genuine, and it has historical relevance. It’s part of our material culture.”

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GREAT BRITISH DESIGN

One Native American legend claims that the first sap bucket was never intended as such. The story goes that a Native American chief (most often Iroquois Chief Woksis) hurled his tomahawk at a maple tree, and the sap began to flow. The liquid dripped into a container on the ground below. Later, his wife, believing that the liquid was water, used it to cook venison, and maple syrup was “discovered.”

The first sap “buckets” were most likely rolled, folded birch-bark containers, which Native Americans would place on the ground beneath notches in maple trees. The collected sap would be concentrated by freezing it several times and then boiling it by dropping hot rocks into the container.

Europeans refined the process of collecting sap by drilling holes into the trees and attaching wooden spouts. They used buckets for collecting the sap and huge iron boiling pots to concentrate it into syrup or sugar.

Metal sap buckets came into popular use around 1875, following the advent of sheet metal. Prior to this, heavy oak and pine buckets were commonly used.

In the 1960s, plastic tubing started to replace metal buckets. Today, sap is collected by tubes that carry sap from the tree to a central container, or sometimes all the way to the sugarhouse. The first plastic sap-gathering pipeline system was patented by Nelson Griggs of Montpelier, Vermont, in 1959.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge, who was running for reelection, invited three titans of American industry—Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone—to his family home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. While there, Coolidge gave Ford a sap bucket that had been in his family for generations. It was signed by all three men, and

“the old Coolidge sap bucket” now hangs in historic Longfellow’s Wayside Inn—once owned by Ford—in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

In 2013, a crew at the Saugeen Bluffs Maple Festival in the Canadian province of Ontario fashioned what might be the largest sap bucket ever: a 1,000liter (264-gallon) giant that unofficially bested the previous record of a 594-liter (157-gallon) bucket, unveiled at the Elmira (Ontario) Maple Syrup Festival in 2000.

—compiled by Joe Bills

August