• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘So they gave me ten per cent. I got it for one-seven-five. I’d been looking for one of these for twenty-four years and I started to shake. It’s like the Holy Grail. I just couldn’t stand it. It was one of the real thrills of my life to finally find one. Other guitar people, they’d all known about it, but nobody had ever seen one. They were all just amazed.’

The variety in Rob’s collection was astounding – the first double-neck electric guitars, dozens of twelve-string guitars, obscure stencil guitars. It was fabulous to see so many fantastically good instruments, rooms and rooms and rooms of them, one after the other. I’d never seen a music shop with that many guitars. It was absolutely amazing.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you before,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m out there. When people ask who I am, I say: “Well, I’m an obsessive, compulsive, manic depressive, eccentric eclectic or eclectic eccentric” – it depends on what day it is.’

Some parts of his collection were especially astonishing – like dozens of almost identical versions of the same guitar, each with some obscure, minute difference that only an obsessive fanatic like Rob would notice.

To my great delight, Rob had something that he hadn’t identified yet, but which I knew well. With only one string, it looked a bit like a banjo and a bit like a ukulele, and it had a wee funny bridge. ‘It’s a one-string fiddle,’ I told him proudly. Rob’s example was a toy version. ‘It’s played with a bow vertically. They used to be popular in Victorian times. You held it between your knees, there was a metal board going down and a horn at the bottom, and you played it like a cello, but it just had one string.’ It was wonderful to tell Rob, a man with such a vast knowledge of stringed instruments, something he didn’t know already.

The fiddle produced a pleasant sound that I remembered from childhood, because a busker used to play one in Byres Road in Glasgow. He had fought in the Battle of Hill 60 on the Western Front in the First World War, and I used to like watching him.

As I continued to look around the vast collection, something intrigued me. ‘What’ll happen to all this, Rob, when you disappear?’ I said. ‘When you leave this mortal coil?’

‘It’s kinda set up right now to where my nephew gets everything I have. I’ve got it set up to where he can keep it, he can sell it, or he can donate it to one of several museums. One is the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. It’s a really cool collection. Or the Ralph Foster Museum, which is down in the College of the Ozarks – it’s called the Smithsonian of the Ozarks. That collection down there belonged to a guy named Ike Martin. When I first moved to Springfield, I was in the cub scouts and we’d go down to Ike Martin’s music store. In the basement he had this museum. And he’d collected everything. He was really a big influence on my life. He collected arrowheads, he collected guns, he collected just anything you can think of. He was kind of the impetus for getting me started. I mean, I always collected stuff. I’ve been collecting baseball cards all my life and coins and stuff like that.’

Rob’s collection is truly unique and I really liked the guy. But that’s nothing new – I tend to like people who collect things. I once met a woman who collected ice-cream cones, and a guy in Scotland who collected space guns. And I heard about someone who collected matches with something wrong with them – like the Siamese-twin matches with two legs and one head that sometimes pop up in matchboxes. Over the years, he had apparently collected enough to fill a frame. Something like a paperclip might be completely ordinary, but if you meet someone who collects paperclips, and they proudly show you their collection, it takes on a kind of majesty.

When I was a kid, I had a friend who used to collect bus tickets – each one of which had a five-figure number running along the top. But he didn’t collect just any old ticket – the five numbers always had to add up to twenty-one. If they didn’t, he wasn’t interested.