I think much of what makes many collectibles collectible, be it furniture, pocket watches, pottery, jewery or classic bikes is what is called "craftman" or "artisanship", meaning that a high level of skill is required in the final production.
Of course mass produced goods can be collectible as well, often based on nostalgia, and there is some of that in bike collecting as well. But the most collectible items and those that often command the highest prices are those that involved a high degree of manual skill and individual judgment by the end producer. If the actual individual who produced the item can be conclusively identified, that usually raises the price, and if he or she actually signed or marked it as his/hers that raises the price even more. That's why the HANDMADE in North American Handmade Bike Show is so fitting.
I think there is indeed a bit of a Hippy or anti-progress character to the collecting of handmade products, as Nick said. And many here were Hippies to one degree or another in our youths, though some of us may deny it now. The collecting of handmade products is an attempt to rebel against a corporate world which attempts to reduce anyone who actually physically produces anything to little more than a slave, or better still replace him altogether with a machine, since even slaves are expensive to feed. Meantime only the CEO's are allowed to make any decisions and all the money.
Of course this type of rebellion against corporate society has been going on since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. But rebelling against the inevitable has always had, and continues to have, powerful emotional appeal.
One great irony is that those who spend significant sums of money collecting handmade furniture, pottery or bicycles often obtained that money through a lifetime of work in the service of advancing the very technology that their collecting rebels against.
Regards,
Jerry Moos Big Spring, Texas, USA
Mark Petry <mark@petry.org> wrote: Angel, great comment. I'd like to find that book. "Personal Mastery" by Michael Polanyi makes some similar points.
The other comment I'd make is that the whole phenomenon of creating what have become our (on-topic) vintage bikes required not much more than blacksmithing tools (saw, files, torch) - in short, old world craftsmanship that could be set up in any barn, assuming sufficient skill in the hands of the builder.
Modern bikes made of tig welded titanium or autoclaved carbon fiber imply a larger and more sophisticated industrial base supplying pre-preg fabric, tooling, etc - FAR more than you could do with 19th century workshop methods.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, most modern bikes are spewed out of factories in China using conscripts on forced labour and shipped en masse to markets with armies of ready consumers - a case study in globalization, just another "product" to be used a couple times and discarded in favor of the next gizmo that comes along.
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Mark Petry Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
mark@petry.org 122.31 W 47.19 N
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