Good topic Mark.

I liked the reference to minerals and fossils... of all my collections that is probably the oldest. Actually, they are hundreds of millions of years old, but that's not what I meant by the oldest... I collected when I was young but I still buy a few geodes or fossils or crystals a year. Here is a recent acquistion (both are quite recent actually):

I got into Heuers the same way as Mark, through seeing the logo on F1 Ferraris. Here are the remnants of an early collection:

But most evocative for me is this kit:

I guess either of these will stir some memories in many of the forum members out there. But it wasn't all F1, my parallel collection to Mark's Autocourse collection is a ridiculously complete collection of books and magazines about the F-4 Phantom, especially those produced by the Japanese publication Koku-Fan (background to this shot):

The link between Autocourse and Koku-Fan is that at that time they had really exceptional photographs. I think I owned one Autocourse, probably 1978. I remember the quality of the printing and photographs was so far ahead of anything else it was unbelievable... same story with Koku-Fan if you liked aircraft.

The link back to Heuer I discovered on this forum... I think it was Ralf who posted this photo of Jeff (Fein)Stein, one of the few F-4 aces, wearing an 1163 Autavia GMT.

There are a few more esoteric collections I own, but I'll leave that for another day