The Idle Pen - The Andrew Turnbull License Plate Gallery

8-2-2009: On Deciding What to Collect

What to collect? That's probably the question that most anyone interested in license plates as a hobby has asked themselves at one time or another. Certainly, it's a sentiment I can relate to...since I've been shifting and fine-tuning my collecting interests for as long as I've been collecting plates.

Of course, it's a bit of a stretch that I've had a coherent "collecting plan" for very long. In the years before I joined ALPCA and began attending swap meets, I really didn't go out of my way to find plates. Thus, I was bound to be satisfied with most anything that sympathetic friends or relatives could procure for me; chips falling where they may. Some collectors continue the "anything goes" mentality for some time thereafter, but no one can (or should) collect everything. So, how to narrow things down?

When I started narrowing down my collecting interests, I had two major focuses in mind: A birthyear run, and a home state run...which in my case was West Virginia. For WV, my collecting plan was relatively simple: Put together a passenger run of the years encompassing the graphic base from my childhood; collect a representative example of as many non-passenger types on that base as I can, then start slowly working my way backward and forward from there towards accumulating a well-rounded collection of dates and types from throughout the state's registration history. My progress was a bit tempered by the overinflated values of West Virginia plates on the collectors' market (low population, single plates, and YOM will do that), but it was a sound enough plan.

When I moved to Wisconsin a year ago, it was inevitable that my collecting interests would eventually drift to that state. This proved to be fortuitous, since I had had a mild interest in Wisconsin for some time: Certainly few states have had quite as much variety in colors, variations, and types over the years. But as interesting as variety is, it proved a bit of a bane in another matter: What to collect? To cover all of Wisconsin's type, color, and variation combinations would involve an insane number of plates. Where and how should I narrow things down?

For West Virginia, I had approached the "map" base as a comprehensive starting point to a collection and as a "set" to complete: It was issued for 19 years with clear divisions between the series before and after, and all non-passenger types apart from motorcycle and government were made on it as well. It was harder finding a similar analogy for Wisconsin: They've essentially had only one graphic design over the years. Only some non-passenger types have been produced on the base, and many of these types had no relation in design to passenger plates until the 1990s; further reducing the variations involved. So compared to my earlier homestate, a graphical type set for Wisconsin didn't seem nearly as appealing a prospect to complete...and many of the most intriguing plate types weren't on the graphic base to begin with.

In the meantime, I started scouting out as many license plate pictures as I could; trying to look for patterns and piece together as much information about Wisconsin's confusing varieties as I could. Then it dawned on me: Why not do a "cross section" run of Wisconsin non-passenger types from my birthyear? Such a project would fit into my existing collecting focuses, and expose me to an excellent sample of the variety I had been witnessing in my research: 1985 passenger, light truck, heavy truck, light truck for hire, motorcycle, dealer, and dual purpose vehicle plates all bore different colors, and many types even employed different colors for validation stickers as well. Some types of the era had debossed borders while others were embossed and painted. Permanent plate types of the era such as Municipal and Collector offered the further wrinkle of still more color schemes and varieties on hand, for a grand sum of what had the potential to be a very intriguing set.

So, it seems that one particular spot is where my Wisconsin collection is headed at the moment. I've also pieced together a partial passenger run, and have a few interesting plates here and there that don't fall into other categories. While for now the images are scattered amongst the other found and taken photos in my Wisconsin research pages, I may devote a page specifically to my Wisconsin plate collection in due course!