What Is a Collector?

By Sandra

What makes a person a good collector or a bad collector? Does the amount of pieces in a collection
matter? Those are all the questions that someone might asked themselves before showing their
collection to others. Yes, that conversation will have a lot of different answers from all different
opinions. None of them are better than others. I will share my collection with you and we can discuss
what makes a piece of memorabilia better than another.

Let’s start from the beginning. My name is Sandra and I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec,
Canada. I have been a fan of Duran Duran since I saw their video Hungry Like the Wolf on the first
Canadian all video station MusiquePlus. After that, I was bit by the bug and, of course, started to go to
my local video store and rented over and over again the 2 Duran Duran tapes that they had, the First 11
videos and Sing Blue Silver. Like all other fans, I was collecting all their posters and magazines that I
could find. My collection was mostly of 16 Magazines, BOP and some French Montreal magazines. I
would cut all the articles and scrapbook them all in construction paper books and glue everything. Back
in the day, there was no sense of acid free paper and glue and all the ecologic red flag that we have
nowadays. I had tons and tons of VHS tapes with all the footage that I could collect from different TV
stations and videos that I would record to have my own collection.

In 1998, I moved from Montreal to Windsor, Ontario, with my collection in tow. I moved into my friend’s
house and she said that I could use her basement to store all my boxes. Keep in mind, I always lived in
apartment buildings so I didn’t know anything about houses and unfinished basements. A couple of
months later, I wanted to get something out of my boxes and to my surprise, all my boxes were filled
with mold. What had happened? Yes, having your stuff stored in an unfinished basement is the worst
thing that you can have happen to your collection. We all know that mold LOVES paper and it’s the
worse with VHS tapes. That is when I lost my Duran Duran collection. At that time, I was heartbroken
and also upset that my friend would not have given me the heads up and let me store my stuff in their
basement. I guess they were doing me a favor in their mind about letting me store my stuff in their
basement, even if I was living there and paying rent.

At that point, I was no longer really listening to Duran Duran, at least not the new music. I had “broken
up” with the band when Roger and Andy left in 1985. I did listen to Notorious, heard about the
Wedding Album, but other than that, nothing. I was still listening to my “old” Duran Duran music from
their first 4 albums.

This brings me up to 2003 when the 5 original members decided to get back together and that brought
my love of collecting back to life. Now we had moved from VHS tapes to DVD and people were selling
DVD with collection of performances and interviews. EBay was also the best place to find what I was
looking for.

So in short, this is the story of how I am a Duran Duran collector. I am a collector of all things. Some
collector will focus on one category of memorabilia. Some collects only vinyl, some others collect only
magazines, or t-shirts or VIP collector items. I collect anything that has do with the band from buttons
to posters, to vinyl, to board game. Since working from home has been my life since March 2020 and that means spending literally all my awake hours of the day in my living room, I decided to make a Duran
Duran corner in my living room. It literally took me almost 2 years to put this together, finding the
perfect setup, finding the perfect memorabilia pieces and also, the money to make the changes
necessary to build my corner. Also remember, I live in an apartment so I can only so do much (I cannot
demolish or build anything). I have decided to share this with all the Daily Duranie fans and to create
some conversation between all of us about collecting. I will also share some of my favorite pieces and
also talk about some of the categories (what is your favorite collecting piece) and also talk about
collecting vinyl. Should a person collect all the version of an album or only get one version of it and call
it, collection complete?

Here’s a picture of my Duran Duran corner (it’s probably more a side). Next article, I will discuss my
favorite piece that is on my walls.