Viewers of the fantastically fun The Saga Vault will be familiar with host Dan Lanigan, and speaking with People magazine, he discusses the show, the collecting world and here the philosophy behind collecting, a hobby he has participated actively in for decades.
As impressive as his own collection may be, Lanigan says it doesn’t compare to the ones featured on Saga Vault, which highlights renowned collectors including Steve Sansweet, Vic Wertz, Gus Lopez, Jimmy Mac and Lisa Stevens.
For Lanigan, collecting has always been about more than simply owning rare items.
“Ultimately what you’re doing is you’re collecting history, someone else’s history and the world’s history,” says Lanigan. “Ideally through that collecting of history, we like to think of ourselves as kind of armchair archivists.”
That shared philosophy is what brought the group’s collectors together. Individually, each had assembled one of the world’s most significant Star Wars collections. Together, Lanigan says, they realized they could create something even bigger.
According to Lanigan, “They all realized together that they arguably each one of them had ‘one of the largest collections in the world,’ but if they put all their pieces together, all of a sudden they had the largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia in the world.”
We spoke with Dan recently on Collecting Tracks, a conversation you can listen to below.
