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Toronto Bottle Show

 

April 19, 2009
16th Annual Toronto Bottle & Nostalgia Show & Sale


 
 

The Collector
By Dave Engholme

We stop, occasionally casting an inquisitive eye about the room and ponder various questions from the Collectors viewpoint.

Why collect? Many of us live in a symbiotic relationship between the struggle to build retirement savings and an inarticulate zeal to acquire some new goody. We harbour at least two mutually compatible and driving passions, like stoneware and your favourite winery or milk bottles and history, that, when combined, creates an itch that must be scratched.

What is a Collector? We are the ones who spend the retirement, delighted in the knowledge we have some fascinating doohickey to look at and learn about, until we join a club and find ourselves re-energized to acquire more ‘stuff’. To us, the notion of divesting approaches sacrilege. But at some point, after our better half relegates us to the doghouse because our collection overflowed every room, rationality may prevail.

Enter the profit motive. This noble pursuit morphs the body to a higher plane of existence. Innate chemistry transforms under the drive to embrace free enterprise. This new lifestyle may restore marital bliss for certain ambitious souls but leaves the rest of us, after some anguish, mental gymnastics or loss of acuity, squarely in the domain of the pure Collector.

Where have all the Collectors gone? Where are the newbies, those nubile vessels of bilious ardor, bitten by the collector bug, thinking it a malady and unable to satiate their misconstrued lust. Where are the fifty-something’s, those vivacious alumnae of the hard knock school who remember Mom throwing out neat medicine bottles, who remember the man with the crocked spine delivering milk to the house and who wonder what happened to the Museum’s Canadiana collection. They yearn to reminisce, to reacquaint, to find a treasure or to experience a visual feast of the sort found at a bottle and nostalgia show.

Enter the Show. Since 1992, the Four Seasons Bottle Collectors Clubs greatest accomplishment has been to host the Toronto Bottle Show. This annual event is the largest regional show and sale of its kind, boasting 100 tables with Dealers dedicated to offering a staggering volume and selection of medicines, milks, stoneware, sealers, sodas, insulators, beers, glass collectables, whimsies and nostalgia in varieties sufficient to invigorate and satisfy any Collector.

For the novice and seasoned enthusiast alike, this Show is your best way to see, learn about and obtain one or more of your favourite doodads.
 

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