Hundreds of thousands of postcards from all over the world have found a home in 92-year-old Donald Brown's personal collection in Myerstown, Pa.

A sealed, near-mint condition 1986 VHS tape of "Back to the Future" recently sold at auction for $75,000, setting a new record for a videotape.

[caption id="attachment_82071" align="alignnone" width="600"] Stan and Mardi Timm show off Johnson Smith novelties they've collected. Stan wears X-Ray Spe...

A rare LeBron James trading card sells for a record $1.8m at auction - nearly doubling the previous record.

What seems like a simple hobby can take you across the world.

If you’re ever in Japan, consider a trip to Chineskikan, located two hours outside Tokyo in the city of Chichibu. The peculiar museum is the only one of its kind, dedicated entirely to rocks that look like human faces. Owned and operated by Yoshiko Hayama, Chineskikan is home to some of the most spectacular stones nature has to offer, with rocks that resemble everyone from Elvis Presley to E.T. Following in her father’s footsteps, Hayama is preserving the legacy of “jinmenseki,” continuing the search for rocks that resemble human faces.

"Bogus Cinderellas" can come from micronations, outer space, or parallel dimensions.

In Chichibu, Japan, there's an odd museum; perhaps the only one of its kind. It's called the Chinsekikan (which means hall of curious rocks) and it houses over 1700 rocks that resemble human faces.

When your games become your ghosts.

A poem by Dutch schoolgirl Anne Frank written shortly before her family went into hiding from the Nazis has sold at auction for €140,000 ($148,000; £120,000), well over the estimate. Anne sent the eight-line verse to a friend in 1942. The auction house in the Netherlands had valued the rare, handwritten note at €30,000-€50,000. Anne is best remembered for her diaries of life as a German-born Jew in occupied Amsterdam in World War Two.

Robert Berlo got hooked on maps at an early age. As a kid growing up in San Francisco he’d pore over roadmaps in the backseat of the car on family vacations. Sometime around age 11 he started collecting them. By the time Berlo died in 2012 at 71 he’d amassed more than 12,000 roadmaps and atlases. But he did more than covet and collect them. Over the decades, Berlo spent countless hours mining his maps for data, creating tables, charts, graphs, and still more maps on everything from transportation systems to the population history of small towns. Now, Berlo’s collection is getting another life as a repository of previously hidden information.

Collectors drive the art world, but what drives art collectors? It’s less about aesthetics than self-identification

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With 24,000 maps and 760 globes, Murray Hudson's cartographic stash is full of treasures.

It is possible to build up a library on an ereader. Equally, you could insist on talking to your friends only via Skype and taking “holidays” that consisted of exploring foreign capitals on Google Street View. Words are just one element of a book and not always the best part. Books as physical objects have a charm that also comes from typography, illustration, format and back-story. That is why collecting books can be such a deep source of pleasure.

The haircut was like any other. John Lennon was preparing for his role as Gripweed in the film “How I Won the War.” The performance was unmemorable. So too was the coif. But on Saturday, nearly 50 years after it was chopped from his head, Lennon’s lock of hair sold for $35,000. The clipping garnered triple the amount Dallas auctioneers expected it to sell for. And not because some crazed Lennon fangirl really wanted...

Nearly everyone interested in records will have, at some point heard, the news that there is a Brazilian who owns millions of records. Fewer seem to know, however, that Zero Freitas, a São Paulo-based businessman now in his sixties, plans to turn his collection into a public archive of the world’s music, with special focus on the Americas. Having amassed over six million records, he manages a collection similar to the entire Discogs database.

Duane Dimock once paid $450 for a box of cereal. But this wasn't the makings of a week of very expensive breakfasts: Rather, it was the box itself that he was after. Dimock belongs to a small niche group of hobbyists who collect cereal boxes, and in their world, $450 doesn't raise many eyebrows. Last summer, an unopened package of Post Ten —€” the now-defunct variety pack of mini cereal boxes €— dating back to 1961 sold for a whopping...

An entomologist reflects on fly-hunting, an outhouse of distinguished provenance, and the narcissism of collectors. By Fredrik Sjöberg.

The recent exhibition titled “Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists” shines a light on how the opening of Japan to the West in the 1850s spurred the late 19th-century European preoccupation for all things Japanese. But inspiration also traveled in the other direction, as seen in these turn-of-the-20th-century Japanese postcards from the collection of U.S. postcard collector Ken Reed.