Annabel Downes enters the curious world of collectors — from dentists hoarding celebrity molars to a man who’s built a life around 3,000 pairs of foam clogs — to understand what really fuels their compulsion.
Few people want to keep hold of a manky old tooth. Children leave them for a fairy in the hope of lucrative returns; adults leave them at the dentist, praying their newly fitted gold one lasts until Christmas. But some have longer afterlives. In 2005, a tooth believed to have belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte sold for £11,000 at a Wiltshire auction house to a dentist eager to add a piece of imperial dental history to his collection. The canine was said to have been pulled from the French emperor’s mouth in 1817, after a bout of scurvy. Six years later, Canadian cosmetic dentist Michael Zuk spent nearly $20,000 on one of John Lennon’s yellowing molars, an investment he now keeps on show in a glass cabinet at his clinic.
In his essay ‘Why Do People Collect? The Psychologist’s View’ for Art Basel, Andrew Dillon examines the stereotypes surrounding collectors. “In the popular mind,” he writes, “collectors are often viewed as individuals with more money than sense, dropping huge sums on rare artefacts… or as mildly disturbed cranks who have an inexplicable need to gather large numbers of items few others deem interesting, invariably cluttering their lives or minds in ways that are unhealthy.” Dillon’s own view is softer. Collecting, he argues, is best understood as a routine rather than an exceptional act serving as a basis for learning, providing emotional comfort and security, and marking our lives in personally meaningful ways. And that truth, he adds, holds whether you’re a celebrity-tooth-collecting dentist or a high-net-worth individual (HNWI) acquiring an Ed Ruscha.
The newly published Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 last month suggests that even among the world’s wealthiest art collectors, the motivations are not purely mercenary but personal. While financial investment ranked highest this year, it was cited by only 24 percent of respondents—a narrow lead over other drivers: compulsion, social connection, and self-focused desires tied to identity and esteem. If those respondents represent the “more money than sense” crowd, what of the so-called “mildly disturbed cranks”? The dentists who pay five figures for a decaying tooth, or those whose living rooms have become porcelain shrines to Princess Diana—or, if you may be that way inclined, to Camilla Parker Bowles. So, I went looking for answers in the UBS report’s everyman counterpart: The Guinness Book of World Records. Flicking past the woman whose fingernails are so long you wonder how she puts her pants on in the morning, or the guy whose eyes bulge to an alarming degree, you’ll find the world’s largest collections—individuals who have turned acts of accumulation into public achievement. Beyond the fame of seeing their name in print, I found myself wondering: what drives them to collect? Is it record for record sake, or is there a motive to the seeming madness? Do they collect for comfort, for control, or simply out of compulsion? And does Dillon’s assertion—that collecting is a routine rather than an exceptional act—hold true even for those who collect for scale as much as meaning?
One of this year’s entrants, Doogie Sandtiger, holds the record for the largest collection of Crocs. Raised in the U.S. foster care system without family, possessions, or a confirmed birthday, Sandtiger spent much of his childhood with nothing that was truly his own. The first pair of Crocs he noticed—lavender, worn by a neighbour gardening—and went on to buy was, in his words, “the first thing I had ever chosen myself.” Their slip-on design mattered more than style, having never been taught to tie his shoelaces. Today, Sandtiger’s house is lined floor to ceiling with 3,929 pairs. Some are encrusted with Jibbitz—the decorative charms designed to plug into the shoe’s holes—of which he owns more than 15,000 (he suspects he may hold the world record for these, too). The rarest pair, he says, is a Balenciaga collaboration: black platform clogs nearly four inches high. “My original goal was 366 pairs—one for every day of the year,” he explains. “When I hit that, the psychological attachment started. I began to associate them with growth, change, development—breaking out of that mindset of a homeless kid with nothing. Now I have property, a name, a life. It gave me purpose.” He is frank about his motivation: “Honestly, it’s psychological. I was always made to feel less human as a kid. At first, it was about spite—I wanted to prove I was good enough. The collection made me feel human,” he says.
Then there’s Nigel Morris, a New Zealander who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Catan collection. For the uninitiated, Catan is a German board game of resource trading and settlement building; a cult classic for those who enjoy the strategy of Risk, but not its all-night commitment. Nigel began playing around 2000 but only started collecting seriously in 2018 as a respite from his work writing repatriation software for a lost-animal register. “In the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, I was really looking for something to get me away from work,” he recalls. “Something I could just sink into and forget about all the anxiety and the stress.” He was drawn to Catan for its cooperative nature: “I live by the five Buddhist precepts, and Catan fits that perfectly. You’re not trying to eliminate anyone. It’s non-violent, and we can all sit around and play together.” His collection now includes around 1,800 Catan games, expansions, and promotional memorabilia such as jackets, hats, and coasters.
However, what became clear in conversation was how this once personal pastime had grown into something distinctly more communal: a network of friendships and exchanges with fellow enthusiasts. The UBS report calls this impulse “relation to others,” ranking it the third most common motivator among HNWIs. In the art world, that instinct plays out over art-fair dinners, opening-night rituals, and WhatsApp groups. Nigel’s version unfolds online, through trades and games. “One of the cool things has been meeting other addicts,” he laughs. In one recent exchange, a Mexican collector helped him obtain a rare Spanish-language Ancient Egypt edition by orchestrating a chain of trades that looped through Germany and back to New Zealand. “Last year, I had my first international visitors,” Nigel adds. “A couple from Germany were on their honeymoon and asked if they could make a detour to Whanganui to see the collection. I’ve got a chap from America coming in a few months for a game.” His daughter, who now lives in London, joins him for weekly online matches.
Finally, there’s Salacnib Molina, whose collections embody the thin line between passion and compulsion. The Filipino American currently holds six Guinness World Records for his collections and is already chasing more. It began with Pringle tubes. Large ones. Pizza-flavoured ones. Pocket-sized ones you get on an airplane. From there, the categories multiplied. Molina now claims records for postcards, finger skateboards (“skateboards for your fingers,” he clarified patiently when I asked), matching salt and pepper sachets, Beanie Babies, and paper cups. By November 2025, he was hoping to break five more. His basement is divided into “extreme rooms,” each devoted to a different collection, and his ambition is to open a museum in the Philippines. Not, perhaps, so unlike the art collectors who eventually build museums of their own—to house their ever-burgeoning collections and display, if not masterpieces, the scale of their devotion. “The rarest one is from KFC,” he said proudly of his salt-and-pepper sachet collection. “I’ve also got a Japan Airlines set—it’s very, very old. I found it through a guy on Craigslist who was selling sugar packets, six bins for twenty bucks. His father had been in a sugar-packet collector club in the fifties. I sorted through them and found the salt and pepper sets inside.” Others, he says, come from his travels.
If collecting as connection defines Nigel, Molina’s is closer to compulsion. The UBS report notes that 11 percent of surveyed collectors described their motivations as “compulsion or addiction”—a small but telling number, and perhaps inflated, Dillon suggests, by the inclusion of the word passion. However, the point is that even the most orderly collections are built on impulses their owners can’t entirely explain. But even Molina’s compulsion contains a sentimental undertone. “Where I came from—the Philippines—it was very hard to get things like Pringle tubes,” he tells me. “My mum used to buy them for me, and that’s how it started.” The collection began, he explains, with the thrill of her returns from trips to the U.S.
Talking to this year’s record-holders, it’s clear that whatever the object, the impulse is rarely financial. Profit might rank highest among HNWIs in the UBS report, but none of the Guinness record-holders I spoke to seemed motivated by it. There can’t be many curiosity museums or eBay bidders clamouring to invest in matching salt and pepper sachets, I thought. However comprehensive the set. What unites them instead is something closer to Dillon’s view—that collecting, whether for Crocs or Catan, is a human reflex: a way to build an identity out of absence, to find community in unlikely places, or to hold onto the comfort of something once out of reach. With all the talk of art market slumps, underperforming auctions, and gallery closures under financial pressure, the art world could learn a thing or two from these guys. Try to collect for love and curiosity rather than for capital and quick returns. Leave that kind of magic to the tooth fairy.
