This study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories—especially music genres—and types of record collecting; and outlines and discusses the infrastructure within which collecting operates. Shuker situates this discussion within the broader literature on collecting, along with issues of cultural consumption, social identity and 'the construction of self' in contemporary society. Record collecting is both fascinating in its own right, and provides insights into broader issues of nostalgia, consumption and material culture.

"With a new preface, this new paperback edition outlines the history of museum collecting from ancient civilizations to the present. It also looks at aspects of consumer culture - advertising, department stores, mass merchandising, consumer desire, and how this relates to the activity of collecting." --Book Jacket.

A celebration of 78 rpm record subculture reveals the growing value of rare records and the determined efforts of their collectors and archivists, exploring the music of blues artists who have been lost to the modern world.

The award-winning title has now been revised to offer the most up-to-date information and consumer protection advice available.

Fans used to be seen as an overly obsessed fraction of the audience. In the last few decades, shifts in media technology and production have instead made fandom a central mode of consumption. A range of ideas has emerged to explore different facets of this growing phenomenon. With a foreword by Matt Hills, Understanding Fandom introduces the whole field of fan research by looking at the history of debate, key paradigms and methodological issues. The book discusses insights from scholars working with fans of different texts, genres and media forms, including television and popular music. Mark Duffett shows that fan research is an emergent interdisciplinary field with its own key thinkers: a tradition that is distinct from both textual analysis and reception studies. Drawing on a range of debates from media studies, cultural studies and psychology, Duffett argues that fandom is a particular kind of engagement with the power relations of media culture.

Revised and Updated for the Gold Rush From one of the world’s most knowledgeable coin dealers–a former consultant to the Federal Trade Commission who is often quoted by the Wall Street Journal–comes a thorough update of the most-trusted consumer protection handbook to buying and selling rare and valuable coins. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs and a full-color insert, The Coin Collector’s Survival Manual, Seventh Edition is indispensable for seasoned collectors and novices alike. This substantially revised edition of the Coin Collector’s Survival Manual includes revised chapters that focus on legal and financial advice for buying and selling coins, and a new chapter on the most secure way to detect coins that have been "doctored." You will learn how to: • Avoid scams when buying and selling gold • Understand the new coin grading system • Detect altered, counterfeit, and doctored coins • Know how high gold and silver coins will climb in value • Buy coins through Internet auctions–and avoid the pitfalls • Safeguard and protect your coins from disaster ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Scott Travers, former vice president of the American Numismatic Association, was called the “preeminent consumer advocate in the numismatic field” by The New York Times. He is a contributor to all the leading coin publications and served as a coin valuation consultant to the Federal Trade Commission. He has been featured as a coin expert in Barron’s, Business Week, The WSJ, MSNBC and TODAY.

Art Collecting and Gifts to Museums questions why private collectors donate their collection, or parts of it, to museums and examines what the implications of this gifting process might be. Presenting case studies from Europe, North America, East Asia, and the South Pacific, this book is concerned with both elite and popular collections and examines the act of donating art from the collector’s point of view. Demonstrating that art museums depend on donations from private collectors, Paul van der Grijp emphasizes that it is crucial to understand the psychological, sociological, economic, and educational motivations for gifting works of art to institutions. Taken together, the chapters argue that collectors donate to museums because the latter represent an imagined community, to whom those collectors would like to bestow a sacred gift. Private collectors are, Van der Grijp maintains, motivated to ensure the immortality of their collections and, ultimately, to preserve some memory of their own lives in the process. Art Collecting and Gifts to Museums will be of interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums, culture, art, anthropology, history, and sociology.

This is the most serious study to date on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera. Documenting how nationalism and colonial modernity reconfigured Chinese discourses on sex between men in the early twentieth century, Wenqing Kang has amassed a wealth of material previously overlooked by scholars, such as the entertainment news and opinion pieces related to same-sex relations published in the tabloid press. He sheds new light on several puzzles, such as the process whereby sex between men became increasingly stigmatized in China between the 1910s and 1940s, and shows that the rich vocabulary and concepts that existed for male-male relations in premodern China continued to be used by journalists and writers throughout the Republican era, creating the conditions for receiving Western sexology.

"This book is a compilation of essays by leading Canadian and international curators and artists that explores the role of the art object in a broader context of visual and display culture. The book analyzes the human impulse to collect and the social context, rhetoric, politics, and science associated with cultural collections." -- BACK COVER.

PMA whole new generation of media activists and culture jammers have taken on the government and corporate advertising worlds.New technologies have greatly assisted artists,writers,film makers and activists to challenge and reverse the one-way flow of mind-numbing mainstream media.Camcorders,amateur and ham radio,mobile phones,the Internet and various other inexpensive means of exchanging signals have empowered this new generatio