mystery in my history...

I keep an antique chest beside my bed. It's small – only eight by twelve inches and five inches deep – and it's showing its age with bumps and scars. Even so, it's a real beauty, hand crafted from dark burled wood with mother-of-pearl inlay on the top and around the key hole. 

A hand lettered card glued inside the lid reads:

M. S. Gainfort
from I. Sawyer
Christmas
1867

I'll probably never know who I. Sawyer was. That detail is lost to the mists of time. But M. S. Gainfort was Margaret Susan, my maternal great-grandmother. I imagine she thought the beautifully polished box was a very fine gift. For me, though, the real treasures are the bits and pieces of history that dwell inside. Some of those bits and bobs have been puzzling me for a very long time. These, for instance... 

Puzzling bits and bobs. (Quarter included for scale.)

I remember how thrilling it was as a child to be allowed a peek inside that box. I loved the tiny boot with its secret compartment. What, I wondered, had the owner been able to hide in such a small space? A banded wood cylinder revealed another small hiding spot. Very odd. And what about the chunk of quartz? It looked like a stone I might find on the beach but... was that real, honest-to-goodness gold glistening on its surface? Most intriguing of all was the weird glass ball with numbers all around. Was there a Victorian era version of Dungeons and Dragons? Somehow I couldn't imagine great-grandma in the role of dungeon master.

Last week I peeked inside the box again and decided to do a bit of sleuthing. It's true what they say. You really can find everything on the Internet. Here's what I discovered...

My cute little boot with its secret compartment is probably a Georgian era snuff box. Snuff box collectors have pinned thousands of images at Pinterest, some of them incredibly ornate. Shoes were a popular shape and I spotted quite a few similar to this one. Mystery solved. (I'm left to wonder... who was the snuff user?)

I'd long suspected this little container may have held pencil leads. Research suggests I'm right. Some similar containers were large enough to hold a small mechanical pencil as well as spare leads.

Did I strike it rich or not? Alas, everything I found makes me think this is iron pyrite or fool's gold, not the real deal. Of course, the only way to be absolutely sure is to have it tested. I think I'll put it back in the box and let the dream live on.

Turns out this little Czechoslovakian crystal ball with its thirty-two numbered faces does exactly what you'd expect a crystal ball to do. It's a fortune teller. This was definitely a surprise and the best discovery of all, but I sure wish great-grandma had saved the instructions.

I managed to find a few photos of partial instruction sheets online and decided to give it a try. I chose "surprise" and rolled a nine. My fortune said:

"An old bag or trunk holds a hidden fortune for you."

Excuse me while I retrieve that hunk of quartz with the solid gold veins. I think I'd better take it to the bank.

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a collectable word…

My name is Cheryl and I'm a collector.

For all who know me as a writer and reader, it will come as no surprise that I collect books. This makes me a bibliophile. I also consider myself a logophile, or collector of words, some of my favourites being collective nouns. Who can resist a murder of crows, a plump of ducks, a murmur of nuns, or a ponder of philosophers?

Granted, most collections are more tangible.

In my youth, I amassed an impressive set of china horses. Oh, how I loved those horses. I probably should have known better than to leave them at the mercy of my mother when I left home. The hapless herd was rounded up and sold at a church bazaar before a fresh layer of dust had time to settle in my abandoned room. The horror! 

Thanks to Pinterest, I can once again run amok with horses, accumulating dozens of gorgeous specimens with no shelf space required. This is important, because I've moved on to new collections that now share my home, namely, blue glass poison bottles and badgers. Yes, badgers.

Why is it that a person who collects beer bottles has a fancy moniker like labeorphilist, while a collector of cobalt blue poison bottles is simply known as a 'cobalt blue poison bottle collector'? There should be a word! 

Toothpick collectors have a word: entredentolignumologists. Even collectors of cheese labels have a word: tyrosemiophilists.

And what of badger collectors?  An unusual obsession, perhaps, but surely I'm not the only badger collector out there. And, darn it, we are worthy of a word!

My personal badger collection includes several plush toys – even a coveted Steiff. This might, if we're very, very liberal with the definition, allow badger collecting to exist as a subset of genus arctophilia (teddy bear collecting). But my passion isn't limited to fabric toys. I have many painted and printed badgers, carved stone badgers, ceramic, glass, and even pewter badgers – art, mugs, plates, pins, earrings – not teddy bears by any stretch of the imagination. It would appear I'm going to have to create my own word.

Just a few of many gems from my badger collection: a snugly plush 'Jellycat' badger, a Wedgwood "I Spy" plate, two carved Zuni badger fetishes, and a sleeping badger painted rock.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term arctophilia or arctophilist is taken from the Greek words 'arcto' (bear) and 'philos' (loving). Makes perfect sense as a teddy bear collector's handle. Looking to my list of collective nouns, I believe I've found the ideal starting point for my new word. A group of badgers is called a 'cete', from the Middle English word for a badger's den (sett) with roots in the Latin 'cetus' or coming together. Combine 'cete' (group of badgers) with 'philos' (loving), and a badger collector becomes a cetephile or cetephilist. I like it! Cetephilist. A truly collectable word.

According to The Psychology of Collecting by Mark B. McKinley, "Everybody collects something." Sigmund Freud blamed our human propensity to collect on latent potty training issues. (Um... ew.) I choose to believe our human urge to collect comes from a combination of nostalgia and "ooh, pretty!" What do you think? Are you a collector?

My name is Cheryl and I'm a cetephilist.

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stillpoint is the blog of Canadian author Cheryl Cooke Harrington