Anne Neumann has the job any Star Wars collector would trade his or her rocket-firing Fett for. As collection manager for Steve Sansweet's massive collection of Star Wars memorabilia housed within his Rancho Obi-Wan museum, she gets to organize, photograph, maintain, and basically fawn over the collection 24-7 -- a responsibility she's proven more than qualified to take on as the museum's live-in curator.
For the last three years, Neumann has been working with Steve Sansweet to catalog his vast collection of Star Wars items, a collection that encompasses over 30 years of merchandise spawned by the saga from around the world. From this organizing effort emerged a book of Sansweet's favorite 1,000 collectibles, called, fittingly enough, Star Wars: 1,000 Collectibles. Due to hit store shelves November 17, we asked Neumann about her day-to-day role as Rancho Obi-Wan's curator, and her involvement with Steve Sansweet on 1,000 Collectibles.
First, are you a Star Wars collector?
I've collected Topps trading cards since 1977. My little sister Joanie and I were big fans and we collected them together (See Joanie in line for Episode II in The Star Wars Vault p.104). We still have our original blue set which we marked up with pens and kept in a shoe box covered in tin foil. We had some other things, but those went the way of a garage sale sometime in the '80s. Life swept us both away after Return of the Jedi and neither of us even knew about Episode I until a month before it opened.
My friend Nick and I decided to go to Toys "R" Us to see the new Star Wars toys about a week after release. I was just picking up a pathetic Ric Olié action figure from the decimated shelves when an employee walked by and tossed an Obi-Wan Kenobi into a kiddy pool beside me. It was at that moment, as I physically dove into that kiddy pool to get that figure, that I was catapulted back to being a nine-year-old sitting on the floor with the dust bunnies surrounded by action figures. I bought everything I could find and then discovered eBay. Joanie and I caught up on our Topps cards and reentered the Star Wars community together. Then one day I picked up Steve's Tomart's Price Guide to Worldwide Star Wars Collectibles. I was blown away.
How did you find yourself in the position of chief organizer for the collection housed at Rancho Obi-Wan?
I went totally Star Wars crazy. My professional specialty is databases and I began to try and put all the information I gathered into a database. I worked for a Star Wars collectible news site; Joanie and I tried to do one of our own at TheForceIsWithUs.com; and I wrote my own online searchable database of collectibles. I ended up with the nice folks at Rebelscum.com and what is now OfficialPix.
My first gig with OPX was San Diego Comic Con 2004 and Philip Wise introduced me to Steve at dinner before the show. I don't remember who all was there, but at some point someone offered to inventory Steve's collection for a salary of $50K a year. Everyone laughed, no one more than Steve. Then someone else countered with $30K per year. I was the newbie at the table and squeaked in a very mousey voice "I'll do it for room and board!" When Rebelscum visited Rancho Obi-Wan in August 2005, I stayed on an extra week to see if we would all get along. I arrived in February 2006 after driving for three days from Texas, by myself, with my sweet cat, Claire.
Can you describe the state of organization the collection was in when you first arrived?
Well, there are 15 collection areas, as mentioned in the book, and it was nearly impossible to walk very far into any one of those areas. All floor space in the entire building was covered in piles to the ceiling. The room where I live with my boyfriend Stew was so filled that it took two weeks just to clean it out to reach the bed. The trading-card room's built-in tables were piled two feet high, and things were so precarious that if one item was pulled from the bottom, the whole mess would come spilling down. The museum floors where all covered and there was not much space to walk. Some of the items had been damaged during flooding the previous month, so it was pretty important to get the floors cleared.
I distinctly remember my first real day of organizing. I was in the receiving room and it dawned on me that a lot of the clutter was simply cardboard boxes, packing material, and other trash. I called Steve at work, which I rarely do, and said "I just want you to know that I'm going to be ruthless."
"What do you mean ruthless?"
I'm sure Steve was wondering at that point whether he'd made the wrong decision. Ultimately "ruthless" meant that we filled two 40-cubic-yard dumpsters full of non-Star Wars trash and junk from the museum and the back storage barn. This was a 10-year accumulation -- and it was a good start!
How exactly do you proceed with organizing and documenting such a vast collection?
I have a FileMaker database that I started writing 10 years ago. It currently has almost 630,000 information records in it, tracking manufacturers, countries, languages, part numbers, characters, prices and more. I also have a laser bar code reader that saves time on data entry. The collection is organized by type of item or by major licensees, then by promotion. There are 160 gorilla racks in the museum building. Each is assigned a number. If all the items on a shelf have been inventoried, the shelf is assigned a letter. New items come into the "receiving room" which is the foyer to my living area. Steve and I go through all the new items together and look at them, admire them, and comment about them. Then they move to the museum to await documentation. If an item belongs to a group that is already in the database it gets documented and put on a shelf with a letter. If the item belongs to a group that I have not documented it gets put with other like things on a non-lettered shelf. As time allows I get to the non-lettered shelves.
The problem is that there is not enough space. A short time ago a wonderful couple from the 501st Golden Gate Garrison, Consetta Parker and Garet Jones, spent the weekend to help make some space. We began by removing items from shelves into banker boxes. Then we moved the first set of four racks over a half-inch and put the items back on the shelves. The next set of four racks moved over two inches. Ultimately we moved 20 racks simply to gain enough space to put in a row of three racks. It was totally worth the effort.
Tell me about Star Wars: 1,000 Collectibles -- I imagine with your intimate knowledge of the collection, you played a pretty significant roll in selecting/locating many of the pieces for the book.
It was a real joint effort in choosing the items. We'd walk through the museum together choosing items or I would take notes when he would give a tour. Steve would give me lists from his memory or I would choose some items by myself. There was only one item in the book that I could not physically locate in the museum and we relied on an old slide. Steve tells a story about another item that he had which can now not be found.
I imagine Steve provided the personal stories attached to each item. What do your contributions to the book include?
There are 1,029 photos in the book. A total of 743 of them are mine. Most of the others were taken by former ILM photographer Alex Ivanov in the summer of 2006. I wrote a FileMaker database to store the photos and provided the initial caption information (manufacturer, country, year). Steve was able to assign the photos to a chapter and a sort order. He also wrote his stories directly in the database instead of a more traditional application like Word. We were able to change the sort and information across all items easily. Then we simply exported the information to the editor.
As primary photographer on this project, I'm sure there were more than a few items requiring creative means to photograph. Can you share any stand-out examples?
Alex actually took all the hard ones, like things hanging from the ceiling and large items secured to the floor. The most difficult one I took was the C-3PO head. It is incredibly reflective and I was seeing everything in the head: the camera, my hands, items on a shelf ten feet behind me, my computer, and even the floor. I built a four-sided box out of white foam board with only a hole for the lens of my camera in the front. The back of the box was open to let the light in. I put the head on another piece of foam board which then sat on a swivel base. I could reach around the back of the box to move the head from side to side and used the remote on my camera to take the photo.
Do you have a favorite piece in the collection, and did it make the cut for 1,000 Collectibles?
I have several favorite pieces, one piece I dislike, and one piece that grosses me out. All of them are in the book. My favorite item is the Canadian Regal Toy Co. Jawa. He's just too darned cute for words -- as well as being very rare and expensive! My other favorites are the German Kinder Egg Happy Hippos. They prove you can mash Star Wars with anything and it works. My least favorite piece in the collection is the Attakus Millennium Falcon diorama simply because it is so HEAVY. It arrived on three pallets -- it still got broken in shipping -- and it took three strong guys to bring just the Falcon into the museum. There's no way I'd ever consider moving it again. The gross one? Well, you'll have to figure it out by reading the book.
Care to share how many items you've documented, and how many more you think you've got left?
I've documented 56,725 items. I suspect that is slightly less than 50% of the entire collection. I haven't documented any clothing, which is a huge amount. None of the library has been done: books, comic books, magazines, and videos. The back loft and poster room are FULL of mystery boxes and displays. And there's a constant stream of new items to keep up as well. It's taken over three years to get this far, and I can't imagine how much further we have to go.
Get the exclusive hand-signed edition of Star Wars: 1,000 Collectibles at StarWarsShop, and be sure to check out our earlier interview with 1,000 Collectibles author Steve Sansweet!
