Man goes to prison for collecting bakelite
He embezzled money from his job to buy it.
I was more interested in the psychology behind collecting.
I've done it all my life and have never really understood why.
From the article:
One out of every three Americans collects something. For the overwhelming majority of them collecting is a satisfying outlet for an array of useful, even creative, impulses, a search for beauty, for instance, or a desire to preserve history. Insofar as the great collectors have stocked most of the world's museums, we are all their beneficiaries.
But collecting has its dark side. At its most extreme, people like Masellis will do just about anything to satisfy a hunger that can gnaw at the will just as hard as an addiction to alcohol, drugs or gambling.
Dr. Eric Hollander, an expert in compulsive behavior at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, says that a collector's physical reaction to finding an object is the same as a gambler's placing a bet: The heart rate and blood pressure rise precipitously, and the brain releases the feel-good neurotransmitters, serotonin and norepinephrine.
The fix doesn't last. "It's short-lived and it disappears, exactly like a drug high," says Russell Belk, a professor of marketing at the University of Utah who has interviewed 200 collectors. And when that happens, the collector's auction paddle starts waving wildly once again.
The therapeutic community has just the fancy lingo for this. "Collectors share a sense of specialness or of not having received satisfying love or attention or of having been hurt or unfairly treated in infancy," says Werner Muensterberger, a Manhattan psychoanalyst.
As is the case with recovering junkies, some hopelessly addicted collectors have no choice but to swear off their habits forever. Like Dennis Masellis, Francis Vitale Jr. looked like a successful executive with a serious hobby. He was an executive at Engelhard and collected 19th-century European clocks. Between 1988 and 1996 he spent $12.5 million on 150 clocks, all paid for by Engelhard and charged off as unspecified "marketing expenses." He made full restitution to the company and drew a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. One thing he swore in his letters from jail: When he got out, he would never look at another clock again.