I do love how sometimes scattered objects find their way back together. Is it fate, Kismet or what? Back in November, I purchased a painting on eBay. Accompanying it was a period photographic portrait of the artist that was mounted on a page from an old photo album. When I saw the photograph in the sale listing for the painting, I immediately recognized it as relating to a photo album that was already in my collection. The album had been acquired 40 years ago and belonged to the family of the artist. When the photograph arrived, I matched it up with the album, and sure enough, you could see where the page had been neatly cut out decades ago. Whether it was a collector or someone in the family, the image was gone. Now, I had the opportunity to put it all back together and restore the album as it had been. My daughter, who works for an auction company, and I were talking the other day about what makes a collector. Of course, it is passion and a willingness to sell ones own blood to finance a great object. But the most valuable of all qualities that a true collector has is a partial or full eidetic memory. This is the ability to see objects and remember them for years to come. Thus you can create a catalog of antiques in your own brain that you can then access when you need to in the future. In the antiques trade, there is the phrase having the eye. It refers to a natural ability to discern truly magnificent things from the surrounding dreck. It is something that you are either born with or not as there is no real way to acquire it. And if you are born with it, you need to work on it as the eye can fail if you are removed from looking at things. Part of having the collectors eye is also having the eidetic memory. Having seen 1,000 Chippendale chairs, you can reference that mental database when you are assessing the quality of a chair that you might want to buy. Developing that ability to match things up is part of the pure passion of collecting objects. My old friend John Snyder could do this with amazing acuity. He could match ceramics to particular services and owners and furniture to specific houses. Clarke Hess, another friend, had a similar ability to connect the dots among the various Mennonite households in Lancaster County. Clarke was related to many of these families, with the result that his knowledge of genealogy was an added bonus. I watched him reunite needlework that was made by the same little girl in the 1850s but which was scattered among numerous households and collections. So my resolution in this the New Year is to not only continue to build my own mind palace collection of antiques but to encourage young collectors to develop their own mental collections. It is how objects and stories can be reunited to tell stories that otherwise would be lost. Born to collect should be the motto of Peter Seiberts family. Raised in Central Pennsylvania, Seibert has been collecting and writing about antiques for more than three decades. By day, he is a museum director and has worked in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Virginia and New Mexico. In addition, he advises and consults with auction houses throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, particularly about American furniture and decorative arts. Seiberts writings include books on photography, American fraternal societies and paintings. He and his family are restoring a 1905 arts and crafts house filled with years worth of antique treasures found in shops, co-ops and at auctions.