Among your souvenirs

Souvenirs are part of the pleasure of going on holiday. Every resort in every country has them — shops full of pottery, cane or leather goods and objects made of brass, glass or china. Some are frankly hideous, mass-produced junk, but the more discriminating tourist can have fun tracking down the real specialties of a country or a region.

The collecting bug is easy to arouse in all of us — from children with their cigarette cards and marbles, to serious collectors specializing in snuff boxes, a particular type of china, antique glasses, fans or miniatures.

Dolls in national costume are an obvious choice; less widespread but fun and a good way to teach children a little history is to collect small busts of famous people — Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon, Napoleon on Elba, Mozart in Salzburg, Churchill in Westerham or Blenheim Palace… Each town with a famous son tends to fill its souvenir shops with his image.

Animals are fun to collect — dogs, cats, elephants, owls — collect them from many countries, made of glass, china, ivory, brass, even cane and straw. A spoon with the crest of each town or city you visit makes an attractive — and useful — collection. Or far more inexpensively you could collect beer mats from all over the world.

Some of the more amusing collections cost only pennies to put together — book matches, sugar sachets, menus from hotels and restaurants, and wine labels.

Holiday albums are much more fun if, with your snapshots, you paste in tickets to museums, zoos, or local theatres, picture postcards and programs. Years later they will bring back happy memories.

Collecting theatre programs is an absorbing hobby. It will help you to re-live great performances at the ballet, the opera or the theatre. And you will be able to show them to your children and grand children for whom a famous actor or singer may be only a legend.

Collecting menus is fun and one day may have some historic value. Think what it's like now looking at some yellowed menu of a Victorian banquet, where course seems to follow course in endless procession!

You can collect menus from hotels, restaurants and trains all over the world. Those little sugar sachets you get with coffee or tea on the Continent are fun to collect, and some people even gather cheese labels from various countries.

Collecting match-boxes is a very widespread hobby — it's actually the labels on the boxes which are the attraction. These can reflect historical, geographical and political aspects of the various countries. Picture postcards can be collected in albums or as a card index system and can divide into many areas — cards from museums and art galleries depicting specimens from their collections: general views; places of historic interest; or even those naughty cards which some of our seaside resorts have specialized in for years!

Junk shops and antique markets
There's hardly a city, town, village or hamlet in the British Isles today which does not have its quota of antique shops, bric-a-brac stores, open air stalls and markets selling everything from old china to old gramophone records.

Antiques are big business today and the chances of a real find are getting smaller, but if you have a good eye you may still be lucky. Many dealers are optimistic rather than knowledgeable and may not know the value of some of their wares. Anyway, the hunt for antiques is almost as much fun as the find!

If you are interested in a particular subject learn as much as you can about it before you start looking for specimens for your collection. Museums are a good place to go and look and to train your eye. Public libraries will have books on many subjects — from silver and china to glass and snuff boxes, furniture to rugs.

As fine antiques become rarer, all sorts of other things gain in attraction for the inveterate collector. Old biscuit and tobacco tins are fun. Some are charmingly decorated, as are old sweet and fruit drop tins. They look very attractive displayed on pine shelves in a kitchen.

You can often find single coffee cups in pretty shapes and designs; as they are the only ones left out of a set they are usually moderately priced. They make an attractive collection, and you can build up an unusual coffee set where each piece is different.

The same applies to glasses. Sets are very expensive but you can often pick up single sherry glasses, wine goblets or tumblers at a knock-down price.

Odd plates are eminently collectable too and in some junk-shops quite inexpensive; they are pretty on shelves or on the wall, or you can build up a dinner service of individual plates — far more pleasant to have nice old plates in various designs than a complete service of something utilitarian and less well designed.

From glasses and plates to beer mugs, or just mugs. Beer tankards can be expensive in silver, old pewter or crystal; they can also be quite reasonable in nice pottery. Old Victorian flowered mugs are pretty, or you can specialize in Coronation souvenirs. You may be lucky enough to find some dating back to the Coronation of Queen Victoria. Certainly there are some about from the time of Edward VII down to our own Queen's Coronation in 1953.

Thimbles are pretty things to collect and take up very little room; or you may prefer to collect old buttons and beads. Every antique market has a few stalls specializing in these.

Old bottles too have their charm —from old medicine bottles to lemonade and ginger ale bottles. Stand them on a window-sill where they catch the light; or till some of them with pretty pebbles in water, so the colors of the stone are accentuated.

Victorian postcards are fun and colorful; you can use them to make a number of things, from a screen to an arrangement behind glass to hang on the wall. Give them a coating of clear lacquer to protect them.

Unless you are a serious collector, don't pass things up because they are less than perfect. A teapot without a lid makes a perfect container for a bunch of roses or spring flowers; so will a pretty jug, and any chips round the top will be hidden by the leaves and flowers. Junk shops sometimes have hideous pictures and old photographs in quite good frames — you can use the frames for your own pictures or have a piece of mirror glass cut to fit. Old baskets without handles can be used to hide plant pots. So keep your eyes open and happy hunting!