Collecting
Beer can collecting was a minor fad in the late 1970s and 1980s. However, as canned beer lost favor to bottled beer, the hobby waned rapidly in popularity. The Beer Can Collectors of America (BCCA), founded in 1970, was an organization supporting the hobby, but has now renamed itself Brewery Collectibles Club of America. The BCCA originally took a stance in opposition to the buying and selling of cans and disallowing buying and selling at their meetings in favor of swapping cans. In response some rival beer can collecting clubs formed who allowed the buying and selling of cans at their meetings, the most significant of which was World Wide Beer Can Collectors (WWBCC). Eventually the BCCA dropped its ban on buying and selling cans, and the other clubs went out of business.
A number of books considered classics on the hobby were published during the heyday of the can collecting fad, many of them featuring color photos of thousands of cans.
As of late 2009, membership in the Brewery Collectibles Club of America was 3,570, down from a peak of 11,954 in 1978. Just 19 of the members were under the age of 30, and the members' average age had increased to 59.
Read more about this topic: Beverage Can
Famous quotes containing the word collecting:
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?”
—Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)