Second Hand Treasures

People collect things for various reasons. I think that for me, since early childhood, it's been an attempt to gather memories, permanence, as we moved from country to country, house to house, while my father built power stations. Keys, interesting stones, coins... those were a few of the first sets in what was then Rhodesia. He, meanwhile, collected butterflies.

A move back to Canada when I was ten and soon after this my teenage passion for comic books began, crowned eventually by paying $60 for a mint condition copy of Giant-Size X-Men No. 1 from 1975, in which most of the new characters were introduced. Now the same thing would cost me up to $5500, though I got out of the craze a few years later and sold it without a loss, at least. Here's the thing: I KNEW that if I could persuade dad to lend me $20000 back then to buy Action Comics No. 1 (1939) in mint condition, Superman's first appearance, it'd only increase in value. Now? Try one or two million dollars for this grail, the starting point of superhero comics, which taps deep into our nostalgia vein and several others, too. No sense living in regret, though, right? Right? If only.

Almost all of my collecting has been of items "previously owned", as the euphemism nicely puts it; simply because they're usually cheaper to buy that way. I was shopping for winter boots as a present for a Georgian friend in the second-hand clothing shops near Tbilisi's Dynamo Stadium, a great source of occasional amazing finds. Case in point: I found some boots for myself that day, ones which I wore with trepidation all through my pre-residence winter visits to Svaneti during all the bad Bandit Years. I'd paid 40 GEL for them, and then seen an identical new pair for over 300. My Svan friend who guaranteed my safety in Svaneti during those dangerous years, thanks to his scary mafia relatives, warned me that the boots only made me a more attractive target for armed robbery... but I wore them for about 15 years, seeing the Bandit Years end.

A friend of mine ran a small town second-hand shop for a while in Canada, and there the finds occasionally were exactly what I was wanting. Two such were a pair of black snakeskin cowboy boots, my size, which I ended up giving to a niece because I could see myself getting them robbed off me in Tbilisi, let alone Svaneti; and an altimeter. My late father had a leather case hand made for this magnificent German device, and for that and its sheer perfect usefulness in my location, it's another thing I love having.

The one thing I couldn't get my hands on was a handmade bicycle from Canada, in Tbilisi; the shop's owner had already set it aside for his son, and I'm sure that he didn't know how many thousands of dollars it was worth. Ah well.

My best recent find was a Harris Tweed jacket in exactly my size again, grey wool, hand woven in Scotland, as the label gloriously proclaims. This was in a Goodwill shop in Canada. Someone effectively paid me $2 to acquire it, though: the $8 price was surpassed by a pair of $5s I found in the pockets, meticulously origami'd into two tiny envelopes which have a trick to open them, so I've left them intact as souvenirs of the serendipity. I just had to find out how much this jacket would cost new: online, it would be 300 pounds sterling and up. Lookin' good, feelin' better!

Now, such finds as these are few and far between. But the possibility of them makes every trip and rummage an adventure you can't match in a shop for new things, which is simply way too predictable. So, I'll stick with the bargain bins, thank you.

By the way, the knitted Svan men's or boys' cap I'm modeling in the photo alongside my Harris Tweed jacket can be ordered in Georgian or Russian for 15 GEL from its maker in Tbilisi, traditional colors of gray, white, black or brown only: Zoya Mchedliani, 593 643117. Get it while it's hot!

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer