CHAPTER ONE Nina Becomes a Collector Against Her Will When Nina was a little girl, her father, who collected everything he thought might be valuable, encouraged her to start a collection of her own. Their house was crammed with musical instruments, old coins, stamps, badges, thousands of small liquor bottles, and all kinds of knick-knacks. The collections had grown so big over the years that they had to be moved into a warehouse, where her father spent all of his spare time sorting his stamps or just looking at his objects and admiring them. The more Nina’s father tried to infect her with his passion, the bigger her resistance to collecting became.