About the collector

I am an old hand at this. Decades of collecting, mostly medals and militaria, with a long detour through the silver, photographs, and odd tools that come bundled in an estate.

I am not a dealer and I am not selling anything. I started buying single medals at shows when I was young, and somewhere along the way I became the person families call when a relative passes and a footlocker turns up that nobody understands. I have sat at a lot of kitchen tables, sorting a life’s worth of objects into what matters and what does not. That work taught me more than any book.

This journal is where I write it down. How to read a medal’s rim, why you should never polish silver before a buyer sees it, how to date a photograph by the mount it sits on. Plain notes, the kind I wish someone had handed me when I started. If a page here saves one family from throwing out the one paper that gave a medal its meaning, it has done its job.

You can call me the collector. The byline says [Author Name] for now. What matters is not who I am but that the objects get treated with the respect they earned. They outlasted the people who carried them. With a little care, they will outlast us too.