None of us live forever, and as more people I've known have passed away, including some collectors formerly on this site, I've become more aware of my own mortality and a need to draw up a will. Generally, when someone dies, it can be quite a burden for the executor to go through an extensive collection of odds and ends if the deceased was a collector of something. Too often, a collection is auctioned off as a whole or even scrapped. Selling items individually on eBay is a burden if one doesn't have the time & interest for it. Light bulbs and old fixtures might not even be considered "collectables" and either kept with the house when it's sold, or thrown away.

In today's world of LED, our lighting collections are most valuable to and cherished by other lighting enthusiasts, and we would know what a shame it would be to have rare lamps and streetlights scrapped. Some of the things in our collections are practically unobtainable anywhere now. So it seems wise, in my opinion, to appoint someone specifically to handle lighting items in a collector's estate, then give specific instructions on what to do with these items (i.e. this person may have first choice for items themselves, then must list the remaining items on L-G for dissemination, either for L-G members first come, first serve to pick them up, or agreeing to ship items individually to other members, with those members just paying the cost of shipping). This is kind of what I have in mind for my own lighting items. In some cases one may desire to sell or auction items rather than give them away, with the proceeds going to benefit a surviving family member or charity.

Any thoughts, or experience from someone who has been through dealing with the collection of a deceased person?

This was case With Jfrog collection.   It took 3 LG member to go though all of Jfrog lighting estate.  And I was able to pass some of stuff to other collectors over the years.   It best to appoint some one local and then make arrangements.  Some of rarest item u can put collector name on it.  And put it in the will that person have to claim it. 

None of us live forever, and as more people I've known have passed away, including some collectors formerly on this site, I've become more aware of my own mortality and a need to draw up a will. Generally, when someone dies, it can be quite a burden for the executor to go through an extensive collection of odds and ends if the deceased was a collector of something. Too often, a collection is auctioned off as a whole or even scrapped. Selling items individually on eBay is a burden if one doesn't have the time & interest for it. Light bulbs and old fixtures might not even be considered "collectables" and either kept with the house when it's sold, or thrown away.

In today's world of LED, our lighting collections are most valuable to and cherished by other lighting enthusiasts, and we would know what a shame it would be to have rare lamps and streetlights scrapped. Some of the things in our collections are practically unobtainable anywhere now. So it seems wise, in my opinion, to appoint someone specifically to handle lighting items in a collector's estate, then give specific instructions on what to do with these items (i.e. this person may have first choice for items themselves, then must list the remaining items on L-G for dissemination, either for L-G members first come, first serve to pick them up, or agreeing to ship items individually to other members, with those members just paying the cost of shipping). This is kind of what I have in mind for my own lighting items. In some cases one may desire to sell or auction items rather than give them away, with the proceeds going to benefit a surviving family member or charity.

Any thoughts, or experience from someone who has been through dealing with the collection of a deceased person?

I collect traffic signals, vintage Christmas lamps/sets and lamps.

I told my wife not to bin everything, and I printed up some descriptions, possible values, and where to post for sale, that I tuck away with most of my collectibles. I also gave pretty good eBay-type listing descriptions to attract the attention of serious collectors. I thought about doing digital copies, but everything is printed on paper and tucked away with/inside each item, that way, if the item survives, the notes are right there, not hidden in some folder on a HDD that may no longer work.

99.99% of people would just bin our stuff, then go on Amazon and order something cheap on Prime then post a TikTok while all dolled up about something meaningless. The world absolutely doesn't care any more.

And, we might follow in the footsteps of Elvis collectors. Elvis memorabilia used to be super hot, until about 5+ years ago. The people who would pay those prices began dying off in droves, and now Elvis stuff is not expensive anymore. A lot of our collections are due to our earliest memories and fascinations with something that newer generations weren't born into. So, my stuff may still get binned, if I'm lucky to live long enough, there may be no one left to care.

I look at these items as someone, who has certainly passed, cared enough to provide them to the world. We are just stewards of these items. My wife and kid don't care, but they agreed to pass them on to the "right" people, using my notes to guide them.

 My family has all told me to find homes for all of my stuff BEFORE I pass or it's ALL going in the dumpster !  They won't even bother with an estate sale or yard sale ! Just hire a clean out crew to pitch everything . 

My stuff will probably go to the dumpster after I’m finished.

Its a very good question.  I think waiting until the last minute is not a good solution - if you are lucky enough to know when that time is approaching.

When I was much younger I inherited lamps from older collectors who had already begun to plan in their 60s/70s/80s years.  At such age it seems that many of the more serious collectors’ interests began to drift more towards knowledge than actual artefacts - and they increased the practicality of their collections by gradually downsizing over a period of many years.  For instance, rather than keeping multiple wattages or brands of a particular lamp, select just one to represent a particular design and let the rest go.

By starting to sell off lamps during retirement it provided a most welcome boost to their pensions, and in return they could see that their items were going to good homes.  By the end there may have been only a few dozen or a hundred lamps left, a much more manageable situation for the executors to then distribute among a few inheritors.

The one thing I definitely do not want to see happen with my collection is for anything to go into the hands of any public museum.  Those places are increasingly becoming nothing more than businesses, whose employees are less and less experienced and interested over time, and whose artefacts are typically locked away in storage where nobody can see or appreciate them.  On the rare occasions they are displayed, the descriptions are often totally inaccurate.  You can’t expect someone who is paid to be a curator for a few hours a day to be as interested or experienced as someone who has a lifelong interest in the subject.  So I would rather see my lamps distributed among the members of this site who I know will understand and appreciate them, show them to other interested collectors who may happen to visit, or discuss them in the galleries and forums here.  Most important for me is that such artefacts do not disappear into a black hole but remain accessible and in circulation.

We should put together a list of people who have volunteered to help out with facilitating the clearing out of lighting estates and their contact information. The only problem is you don't know if someone has passed on, or the person's family members might not be willing to contact someone.

Another idea that also works is for us collectors to build dedicated lighting museums and have us collectors be the curators where we can accurately share our knowledge and educate others on the true history of lighting and have our lamp, ballast, and fixture collections on display for the public to see and we can pass down our knowledge to future generations of lighting collectors that can function as curators in preparation for us collectors going EOL.

In addition, another thing to consider when designing a dedicated lighting museum is that when considering exhibits that consist of “living lighting” installations (installations of historically significant light fixtures that use the lamps that were originally designed for them such as preheat fluorescent tube fixtures with REAL fluorescent tubes, ballasts, and starters) would need to be turned on very occasionally like once per year on only one day for a few hours at the most because lamps have a finite life and using the discontinued lamps too frequently would eventually cause working lamp specimens to burn out of existence and then the “living lighting” installation would cease to be authentic and future generations of people would have NO idea of what lighting used to look like in bygone eras. If you look at what happened to the Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapor lamps, carbon arc lamps used for street lighting applications, and Nernst lamps, people did not care about stocking up on enough lamps, ballasts and fixtures to be able to preserve those lamps and fixtures designed for them in the first place. As a result, almost nobody has an idea of what it is like to see a Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapor lamp or a carbon arc lamp used for street lighting applications in action. In the exhibits that contain “living lighting” installations, modern fixtures would have to be used most of the time so that historical lamps  can be preserved in working condition for as long as possible so that future generations can appreciate lighting of the past for as long as possible.

If you see this thread below, it describes what eventuallyhappens if certain light sources are not cared for and appreciated by many people and thrown away:

https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=9&pid=86985

This will mean that it will eventually become progressively more rare to find a long-discontinued lamp in new old stock and eventually very rare to find in working condition as people continue to throw away obsolete lamps and not care about them instead of preserving them in museums.

Yeah, this is one thing I've though about, and have concluded that it's best to just not think about it. I don't have kids and won't have kids and neither will my sister who I live with, so unless a kid of a cousin or something wants the house, likely the house and it's contents will go to some charity who will just discard all my souvenirs and scrapbooks and photos and try to sell anything they think has value. My Department 56 stuff it's really easy to look up the value of it, but say my yellow Dichro-Color flood or new in package Halarc lamp are going to look just like any other light bulb worth at most a dollar to most people. With traffic signals I also have some extremely rare stuff that doesn't look especially notable.

As a lot of you know I have probably the largest collection of low pressure sodium fixtures, that would appear as scrap metal to most people. It's still my intent to rehome them, but COVID got in the way, then I got involved in a legal dispute between relatives over an estate that resulted in me needing to spend extensive time in North Carolina. Finally a tree fell on and destroyed a large part of my deck, (missing the lights by a few feet), so I had to deal with making space in the garage for them and rebuilding the deck and all the dealing with contractors and insurance. I did sell a couple to Lighting Gallery members that approached me including one that survived being shipped. I have another sale pending so this works out I'll feel more comfortable shipping them and now that they're in the garage I'll be more inclined to deal with them. I was a lot more excited about rescuing them then reselling them and half the year they were buried under snow and the other half of the year it was nice so I was more inclined to do other stuff.

Not sure what we'll do with our stuff. We've a lot of duplicates, so we'll definitely try and sell or trade some of those, but we've got to sort through them first..! What to do with what's left, I don't know. We've thought of a museum for some of the rarer stuff, but after the comments from James we're not so sure any more 

All we can say at the moment is be nice to us and we might think of you in our wills 

Ria & Sammi 

This is the MOST IMPORTANT topic for all of us and I feel we NEED to all get together to discuss it at length. Interesting what James has to say about Public Musea...it is as if he has either read my mind or we had discussed this in the past but I have forgotten about it. Here in Tasmania public musea seem to function as places for "retired" local government bureaucrats to "retire" to on full pay! A second lamp collector here in Hobart, the late Phil Andrews..his wife sold his whole collection to the Museum in Lanuceston for 1000 bucks...parts of his collection have migrated to the Waddamana-B old hydro power station museum where they are crudely displayed in an old circuit breaker cubicle at the far end where almost nobody ever ventures. The "curators" there have no clues and no interest beyond their weekly paychecks. The whole place is actually depressing, the exciters are missing off the machines, bits of brush holders are scattered about...it is obvious that those tasked to "look after" the place are utterly clueless. Phil's lamps were recognizable as his because his log numbers were still written on them.

I have oft "toyed" with the idea of shipping the whole damn twenty foot container of lamps to Europe because, as a Tasmanian I have this perception that Engineering History is more respected and valued there, (and we are just a bunch of hick philistines here) but these postings seem to suggest otherwise. It is certainly "pearls before swine" here...and only getting worse as others have entoned above, as seniors die off and ignorant young bucks replace them. This problem seems to extend far beyond just light globes and collectors/preservers of other manufactures articles seem to be struggling too. (I realized long ago the importance of schooling the next generation and how the ageing of society is a continual process that relentlessly makes us collectively dumber!).

We had this radio and gramophone collector here. He lived at Mangalore on the northern outskirts of Hobart on the Midlands Highway in a large rural Georgian, Convict Built Jurassic Sandstone Mansion with a multitude of barns and outbuildings. Both the house (bar two or thee rooms where he and his brother lived) and most of the outbuildings
were CRAMMED FULL of gramophones and valve radios dating from c1880 to c 1940. He and his brother decided to open it all as a museum and went to the local council to see what was entailed...Oh, You need public liability insurance, you need public toilets, you need wheelchair ramps, you need a halon extinguisher system, etc, etc, etc, etc, .....  He and his brother went...Bugg3r IT! And started to dismantle the collection. Apparently, the vast bulk of it, the best of the best bits were sold online, not sure if it was E-Bay, other online auctions or both but about 80% went that way over a bout a six month period. A remaining 15% went to a local auction held every Friday. I went out there and saw the stuff, it filled the auction, about 90,000 square feet, 1000 square meteres of floor space...for weeks..about six weeks. I bought a few radios, three or four. The remaining 5% left at his property, he dug a hole with a backhoe and buried what was left...and no more "legendary" "Goodwin" collection. He and the brother did it because they were just getting too old and had to move into Hobart to be closer to healthcare and respite care.

About 20 years ago I was filmed for a National Television Production, "Collectors" to be screened on ABC TV. They pestered me for about a year. Initially I flicked them off because I had this inkling that they were just going to use me. In the end I relented but on the condition that I be allowed to raid the stuios' lamp storeroom and take any lamps I saw fit...you want something from me and I want something from you, so let's "trade".
  So they made it, about 4 hours of filming edited down to about a 90 second segment in the program. I got to contact a few of the collectors of other things that had also featured in the production and we got to discussing the very topic being considered here. Ultimately we felt that some sort of "official" government assisted scheme aimed at preserving the NATION'S industrial heritage be in order so we approached the ABC, a federal government run NATIONAL broadcaster. Very quickly we got the inkling they HAD NO INTREST...or even negative intertest...they wanted to showcase our collections but when it came to accepting some responsibility for the long term preservation of the same, they backpeddled very rapidly and in short order eventually ghosted us completely. I have been very wary of the intentions and motives of mainstream media ever since.

Another Australian Collector of lamps up in New South wales divested his collection about a decade ago now. His collection was unique in the fact that it cointained both the FIRST and LAST lamps ever to be made in Australia! So his collection "bracketed" ALL Australian lamps! He offered it to the AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM in Canberra...they were,t interested at all! Eventually he dis what the Goodwins at Mangalore with the radio and gramophone collection did...sold it off online or sent large chunks of it to other, younger collectors. He still holds a bare minimum of his rarest lamps. I saw his wifs's death notice in the papers about six months back. He sent is first and last lamps at another collector up in Briabane.

I also got a very unusual E-Mail from a famous Czech collector about 18 months ago, basically it said, "What have I done with my life,! Have I made a horrendous mistake?"

I turn 60 in July 2024, my eyes a gradually going, I need bifocals now, I can't hear anything above 10KHz anymore, (No longer get bugged by the 15.625 KHz whistle of an old TV's Line Output Transformer!). I get pains in my legs that come and go for no particular reason, I can't swallow properly anymore I need to force 80% of my food down with copious amounts of water ..which makes me wee a lot....getting old is like the title sequence of that old BBC Edward Woodward starring dystopian TV drama series "1990" where the walls of a room gradually close in until the occupant can no longer move as the remaining space is smaller than a 'phone booth. Sort of like "the frog in a saucepan", when do you bail??

The semiconductor lighting paradigm shift exacerbates the situation...all the "Young, Dumb and full of C...m's" only look forward (Or into their i-Gadget screen), very few have the desire, or dare I say, even the ability to even comprehend the need to look backward over one's shoulder to see the (Technological) path we have come along. Ask any one of them how many man-hours of effort, research, programming, design...has gone into the i-Gadget they can't peel their eyes from and the best response you'll get is, "Huh?".

I went back to visit my In-Laws in Viet Nam a few months back. I took one of my nephews down and stood him in front of the Sai Gon post office, a an imposing French Baroque piece of architecture right in the middle of district one. Up on the facade, in little plaques, quite difficult to see, are the names of important Scientists and Engineers. Volta, Laplace, Franklin, Faraday, Ampere, Pascal etc. I drew my nephew's attention to these plaques and asked him why he thought they were there and whose names were in them...when I could "scrape his face" off the i-Gadget in his hands for more than 10 seconds yo get him to actually LOOK, his response?  "I don't care about history, what is past is gone and not relevant now!"  I came back with the reply, "That gadget you have there that you can't seem to peel your eyes from would not exist without the contributions of those whose names a listed up there." On the forecourt of the post office was a demonutable temporary building placed there by a forklift, it was a pop-up sales room for Samsung Galaxy Mobiles..I continued, gesturing to the temporary structure, "This would not exist without them!". It had little effect...they all live in a "dreamworld" these days. In fact Vietnam was WORSE than Tasmania for youngsters faces glued to i-Gadgets!

  So, yes I feel that all valuable, nice and interesting things are eventually rendered worthless...a sort of socio-political second law of thermodynamics if you will...not only does entropy have its physical aspect but a mata-physical aspect too.

  I did have the hope that Europeans might respect the past more than here, I hope I'm not mistaken. This is an important topic all the users of this site need to see and contribute to.

Globe Collector,

I resonate with what you said regarding the younger generations and screens. I'm a junior (third year) of high school and am surrounded by individuals who think just like your nephew does. It's really unfortunate to see, but what I will say is that there ARE individuals out there who enjoy learning about history, about the greatest minds of the past; there are still people out there who want to know the why behind everything, not just mindlessly comsume what is given to them. Just not as many. Alex and I, among others, are some high school-aged kids on here to learn from the lamp intelligentsia, such as yourself, James, Max, Medved, etc, etc. I could go on and on. You all are our role models. If lifelong collections have to, at some point, be passed down somewhere, they at least have a place to go. The world is not devoid of hope, inquisitivity, and understanding. At least not yet. 

Reading this has depressed me a little. For multiple reasons.

While I would not consider myself a religious collector or even a good one. I definitly still respect the idea maintaining past tech for future generations. Whether it be lamps, phonographs, tube radios, hell, even computers and cellphones. The idea of my stuff getting thrown out when I die kindof just kills my mood to even bother in the first place. Not that I'm gonna stop or throw my stuff out. But it's just kind of a bleak outlook.

I'm still young so I have no clue who to write a will to. Might have to wait 30-40 years to find someone far younger than me to pass the collection on to. As of now the people that are far younger than me are literally toddlers.

I think one of the important things that must be done to atleast give a collection a chance in the case that you croak is keeping a detailed history/log/datasheet etc on each lamp and maybe displaying it like something that you would care about. Keeping them tucked away in boxes may be safer but it also just leads to people viewing it as a hoard rather than anything of value. If one had a glass display case with a placard with a detailed description much like what James has on his site. They may be more likely to survive. But who knows. I still haven't gotten around to this admittedly.

As of late I've been more focused on resto-modding my truck.

It is simply impossible to save every last historical artefact from the dumpster. Museums don't always have the space or the scope, and in today's world they have to keep into account drawing in visitors to pay for the museum too, in an era where less and less is subsidized.
Floor space is expensive, and if you display 1000 incandescent lamps in various shapes and sizes, only very few visitors will be able to appreciate the relatively tiny differences between them. So either the stuff will end up in the basement, or it'll be culled from the collection.

For the really impressive stuff, you could try to see if a national tecnical university has a study collection. The University of Amsterdam has a collection of antique computers, for instance. It's only accessible by appointment.

With 32 years, i'm one of the younger people who have an interest in old tech. But also, being a younger person, i have no chance of getting an entire house to myself. I must make do with a small apartment, which is already a real challenge to get.
This means that even if you find a young person to give your collection to, that they *will* need to throw away a considerable part of it, simply because the newer generations don't always have the comfortable housing situation of the people who were able to collect an entire house full of goodies.

I have literally been offered some 135w sox lamps completely for free, and had to refuse because i lack a place to store and display them. It's extremely frustrating and worrysome because by the time i might have a larger place to live - give or take 15 years - you can bet your ass that at that point in time, most of it will be gone.

The exact same goes for collectors of household appliances, radios, gramophones etc.

That said - it's important to also archive the online heritage. John Hupse, one of the big names in the vintage radio community in the Netherlands, had a beautiful (basic) website with loads of information. He died a couple years back. However, someone took on the job of keeping his website online and functional.
I think it's highly important to arrange a similar thing for James's site (Lamptech) so even if the phyiscal artifacts become rarer and rarer, people can see the developments of the various lamps through time.

Arrange everything while you are stil alive. Separate stuff in 'Historically significant' and 'Give away/get rid of as bulk'. With a bit of luck, if you already have an entire lot of significant lamps, someone will still want to accept the entire lot. If your family needs to vacate your house within a month or so, they cannot go and attempt to sell off every significant lamp separately. You cannot expect them to be grieving and dealing with the horror of making appointments with a dozen different buyers who each want to come at a different time and date, or start to get picky when they arrive and try to haggle on an already established price etc.

Don't expect anyone to pay good money for it. Monetary value is extremely personal, and especially when there's a deluge of collections being liquidated, market effects will push down the monetary value of historically valuable lamps. And of course selling in bulk is the only way that your family will be able to realistically give your collection a good house. But since there are only few people able to accept a bulk order of lamps, that will reduce the monetary value even more.



This is a Philips 634a. One of the most wanted 1930s sets there was. Back in 2008, these sometimes went for €1000 on radio swapmeets.
By now, the elderly collectors are getting older, not buying new old things anymore, or actively trying to sell stuff themselves. For a couple hundred, you can now have one. The times are changing.

135W SOX are rare/collectible enough that you can surely devise some place under the bed for the couple of them (if you really really want to keep some)...