Collector - A person who collects things of a specified type, professionally or as a hobby. >>> www.oxforddictionaries.com <<<
Do you remember when we were kids and we collected stickers, papers with cartoon characters or pokemon cards? Part of it was exchanging or even trading some of the goods with the colleagues at school. So I did some research and it turns out, that it's still happening - between the adults. I got to discover many different types of collectors, the ones I found the most surprising are listed below.
Some people collect, just for the sake of collecting, they admire material objects and are interested in the things they gather. Others are collecting for an income, they hope that the value of certain objects will increase and they will make profit out of that one day. I find it quite risky, since no one can predict the future and most of the items are more likely to lose their value than increase.
So usually I related collectors with hoarders, but actually those two differ from each other extremely. A collector, gathers items with passion, stores, catalogues, displays and takes care ofhis collections. A hoarder just accumulates huge amount of junk, which clutters his/her environment.
Turns out that one can collect absolutely anything, not just paintings, comic books or stamps:
Lotologist - a person who collects lottery tickets.
Tyrosemiophilist - a person who collects cheese labels.
Dipterist - a person who collects insects.
Arctophilist - a person who collects stuffed bears.
Personally I'm not a big fan of collecting, I think it takes a lot of space and personally I wouldn't find the will or time for swapping or trading old items, but I do have small collections of things that I use, like eg. crayons or mugs.
How about you? Do you have any type of a collection?