Jump to a part of the story:
The Beginning
Dawn of the CBT
College
Magical Internetland
The Present and the Future

I doubt I'll hear much opposition from my own generation when I state that the 80s and 90s were pretty much the ultimate decades for toys.  Big franchises like Transformers and My Little Ponies were in their heyday, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were dealing with the Shredder both on TV and as a myriad of action figures, and the incredibly popular new console gaming systems were not only cartridges by the bucket, they were also regularly unveiling massive new lines of awesome merchandise ranging from tee shirts to thermoses.  Back then, Matchbox cars lounged away comfortably in the depths of brightly-colored breakfast cereals and cartoons existed in perfect symbiosis with their subsequent toy lines.

Growing up alongside these gems of consumer culture did have a downside, however.  That being; even IF you narrowed your focuses down to just one toy franchise, it was still nearly impossible to collect everything.  Parents never seemed to understand the true usefulness of that new, glow-in-the-dark accessory or the earth-shattering importance of the limited edition magazine send-in special.  Inevitably, most of the kindergarten crowd was hampered by one one very glaring limitation: cash, or rather the lack thereof.

There were a couple of magical kids out there who always seemed to have every toy, but most of the rank and file had to wait patiently until Christmas or a birthday to add to our collections, and even then it was only by the graces of yearlong not-so-subtle hint dropping that we were able to do so.  Although there's no way for me to go back in time and figure out exactly what was going through my head in 1990, 5-year-old me devised a clever answer to the question of money; I decided to start collecting something that was free.

Dawn of the CBT

Cardboard things (which my family shortened to "CBTs" before I even knew what an acronym was) are a difficult thing to describe to someone without providing samples.  Despite the fact that they usually go unnoticed, CBTs are EVERYWHERE.  They are especially common in dollar stores, toy stores, and hardware stores, but even grocery stores and malls have some choice deposits if you know what to search for.  In some ways, CBTs were an even more satisfying thing to collect than toys as a kid because I was virtually guaranteed I would find some on every outing I took with my parents, even when we went to places with no toys at all.  Plus, as I mentioned earlier, they were totally free.

I'll be the first to admit that collecting bits of cardboard was an odd habit, but my family thought it was excellent and I remember my grandma in particular sending me large quantities of CBTs by mail (which was sort of like a miniature Christmas every time a letter with a telltale parcel in it arrived).  After a while, the sheer quantity of them I'd accumulated became impressive in itself, and even the initial skeptics were eventually somewhat awed.  I kept my loot in a pink plastic container that looked like a trash can, and I added to it steadily for several years until I gradually lost interest.  About once a year or so I took the container down from a high shelf and looked through it, but there was definitely a point where my collecting ended and I moved on to other things.

College

The state of my collection in its pink garbage can remained virtually unchanged for more than a decade until I graduated from high school and moved into my first one bedroom college apartment.  At that time, my parents decided I finally had space for a bunch of the non-essentials (toys, memorabelia, etc.) that had previously been stagnating in my my bedroom at the house, and they sent it all my way.  The CBT collection, naturally, was included.

I studied art in college, and I think my interest in CBTs reignited around the same time I was taking an advanced plaster mold-making and casting class my junior year.  Ignited by a whirlwind of conversations about fancy things like consumerism, Duchamp, and negative space, I started thinking about CBTs again a little and subsequently moved my collection into a glass canister in my kitchen where I could look at them more often.  I wasn't really trying to make a statement or get attention by putting them there, but the collection turned out to be a pretty killer conversation piece. 

Of course, by conversation, I mean I got asked "What IS that??" a lot.  A LOT!  My budding re-interest blossomed into tiny mania as soon as I realized that people, particularly those on the internet, might be interested in seeing these things, too.  After all, people on the internet like all sorts of things.

Magical Internetland

It took about a year to go from "This should be on the internet!" to it actually happening.  It was difficult to justify taking time out from my loaded college/work schedule in order to count and sort miniscule bits of cardboard, no matter how cool or interesting I thought they were.  Eventually, I decided that my first logical step was breaking down the madness into manageable pieces.  Thus commenced the sorting.

I knew from the beginning of the organizational process that I really had my work cut out for me.  Most CBTs are one-sided, meaning not ONLY did I have to sort them, I had to flip about half of them over to even figure out what color or pattern they were before actually moving them anywhere.  I also had to decide exactly how many categories I was going to break things down into and how much room in my tackle box each said category should be allotted.  This is just a small amount of what I had to sort through:

Some of the CBTs were harder to sort than I had first imagined, too.  For instance, there were so many light blue and greenish CBTs of various hues I had to separate them into four different categories;  green, light green, aqua, and light blue.  The distinctions between these categories weren't always clear either, and I moved a lot of CBTs around before I felt satisfied that they were all categorized correctly. 

Above is a picture of the box fully sorted.  Below is what the box looks like with the lid closed. 

I did all of the sorting in stages over several days, and I'm guessing I spent at least 10 hours on just organization, including the time it took me to test and reject other containers.  Looking back, this part of the process could have easily taken much longer.  The fact that the collection was taking up my WHOLE dining room table was pretty good motivation to finish this stage quickly, though.

After laboriously organizing every single CBT, I was faced with the dizzying task of finding a way to display them on the internet.  This turned out to be a much more trying process than I had first predicted.

Pictured above is evidence of the first method I tried.  As you can see, photography definitely presented me with some challenges.  The nuances of the CBTs were entirely lost in the bad lighting of my apartment, and my camera had a frustrating tendency of putting a slight curve on everything I photographed.  The flash, too, created an unpredictably high amount of glare.  After only a couple of trials, I could tell this particular method wasn't going to work at ALL and was a tad disappointed.

Around the time I ruled out the camera method, destiny stepped in and my printer broke.  It was a huge pain at the time due to the high printing demands of school, but as a plus, it gave me an excuse to buy a new printer.  A printer with a scanner.  The good news:  Scanning CBTs worked surprisingly well.  The bad news:  It took A VERY LONG TIME TO DO. 

In order to get a picture of a group of CBTs, they had to first be organized on a sheet of paper and then transferred one by one face down on the scanner bed in reverse of the paper design.  This made it nightmarish to fix any last minute layout issues, because CBTs are (for the most part) all an identical brownish cardboard color on their reverse sides.  To top it all off, I had to avoid getting dust or fingerprints on the scanner bed, something that was most easily accomplished by surgically placing things about with tweezers.  As an added bonus, I have a cat who A) loves scanners, B) loves to shed, and C) loves playing with tiny, colorful objects.  The above picture shows some evidence of the cat's help with page layout. 

Touche, Delores.

The Present and the Future

As I've mentioned, finding the time to turn my disheveled collection into a somewhat orderly website was a task and a half, and it took a very long time.  I've scanned over 2500 CBTs already, and by my approximations I'm only about halfway done.  The site itself is still not quite up to my standards of quality yet, but it is gradually improving.  I'm not sure what benefits this site will reap (if any) other than the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do, but I suppose only time will tell.  If nothing else, I think that 5-year-old me would be pretty proud.

I hope you enjoy the site, since that's what it's here for!  If you want to follow site news, you can check it out here.  I'm also an illustrator and comic artist/writer, and you can check out my portfolio here!  (I'm currently looking for work!)

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