During the day, Amy is a mild-mannered partner in a small marketing and graphic design firm. But by night, she’s Spectergirl, avid collector of offbeat ephemera and blogger extraordinaire. The busy Columbus, Ohio, native is also the mother of two boys (with another on the way) and the wife of a fellow collector. That’s pretty superhuman.

Like most of the young collectors we’ve profiled in this column, Amy grew up liking old things. However, she pinpoints one day when she was eight years old as the “day it all began.” Her parents had some things to sell at a flea market, and they took Amy and her siblings along for the outing. Amy was given one dollar to spend at the market. “I spent it all on four or five vintage Nancy Drew books from the 1940s,” she recalls. “I had no real idea of what I had, but I just liked the age of them, even then.”

By the time Amy was in high school, her collecting had begun in earnest. However, she admits that she didn’t really have any direction. “Everything appealed to me,” she said. She also didn’t have access to a wide variety of antique shops with good turnover. Amy just bought what she found exciting. Like many fledgling collectors, she made mistakes, but also learned from those mistakes.

Today, Amy has narrowed her collecting compass to hunting for Gothic romance novels from the 1960s and 1970s, comic books, Ouija boards and vintage View-Master reels and collectibles. She said, “It’s nice to search for items that, when you find them, don’t break the bank.”

Amy has been a fan of comics since college. A photography major, she began with the favorite DC Comics series of 1990s arty college kids around the globe, Neil Gaiman’s seminal The Sandman. Then she met her husband, also an art student and a collector of comic books. She discovered vintage romance comics and the rest was history. “I was already obsessive about antiquing, and this discovery was like opening a floodgate,” she says.

Soon after, Amy started to collect View-Master reels. Being a photographer, she was interested in the artistry behind the three-dimensional slides. “I had grown up in the era of 1970s View-Masters, when the majority of the reels you found were about cartoons. So when I ran into old View-Master travel reels, I was instantly in love.” She also picks up other interesting View-Master related objects. Among her most treasured collectibles is a 1950s bakelite storage box for reels.

One of Amy’s more interesting collections is her accumulation of vintage gothic romance novels. Eight years ago, she bought a box of paperbacks for just $2. “I don’t even remember what in it caught my eye – maybe nothing, just the appeal of a box of books for $2 – but in it I found something like 13 of the 1960s and ‘70s novels, all featuring a woman running from a house or castle on the cover. I found these covers so amusing that I have been picking them up for years just for the sheer joy of owning copies of these paintings.”

This fortuitous find has perhaps led to Amy’s Internet notoriety. She recounts that her husband started a blog to discuss his collection of Silver Age comics (roughly, those from circa 1956-1970). Watching him post in the evenings, she devised a plan for sharing the amusing gothic paperback covers she’d amassed.
Using the online moniker Spectergirl, Amy began posting the blog Women Running Away From Houses (womenrunningawayfromhouses.blogspot.com), which she subtitles “Judging Books by Their Covers.” On the blog, Amy shares the covers of these romantic thrillers, many of which she admits she’ll never read, and offers clever commentary. The site has picked up attention from the blogosphere, and through her blog she’s even made contact with the descendants of some of the artists! “It is wonderful to find out little-known information about these great illustrators from the past from their family, and I am happy that they see how their father’s or grandfather’s illustrations are still loved today,” she said.

Several other blogs have sprung up from her other collections, including Spectergirl’s Crypt of Post-Code Horror, dedicated to comics published during the restrictive days of the Comics Code. Her husband, who goes by “The Ghost Who Blogs” online, also contributes. Amy also maintains a blog detailing her View-Master reel collection, View-Master 3-D Spectacular Now in 2-D! Throughout all of her blogs, Amy’s own sense of fun and humor shines through.
Amy looks everywhere for objects for her collection: garage sales, flea markets and even online. “Of course,” she quipped,” for me, nothing compares to the musty bargain basement of a comic shop.”

She hopes that her children inherit their parents’ collecting bug and love of vintage and antique treasures. “I like to think they will embrace our love of collectibles as they grow older, but they will probably sell all our stuff in a garage sale for 10 cents after our demise,” she humorously says.

It’s hard to see how the boys would dislike their parents’ collections; the vintage stuff Amy and her husband collect is offbeat and cool. Antique Ouija boards hang on a wall, and the boys’ rooms and bathrooms are decorated in vintage motifs of cowboys and robots, instead of the garden-variety kids merchandising popular today. Amy’s kitchen is even decorated with vintage B-movie lobby cards!

Amy advises other young collectors to start blogging about their finds. She notes that the online journaling has added a level of fulfillment to collecting. “I would encourage anyone thinking of sharing their collection in some kind of online format to do it, absolutely,” she said. “Being able to share my thoughts on my collections, no matter how silly those thoughts are, has really increased my enjoyment of them.” And in doing so, she’s let many readers in on the enjoyment, too!

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Katherine McKerrow may write to her in care of this publication.