This past weekend we had the opportunity to see the folk duo Crowes Pasture, made up of Monique Byrne and Andy Rogovin. We recently started frequenting Goodfolk in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and Monique and Andy played three sold-out shows there from Thursday through Saturday.

Goodfolk itself has a pretty interesting story. Founded by musician, entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist Dan Pallotta, the venue occupies a restored blacksmith shop at 7 Central Street in Topsfield. The building dates to 1915 and was originally built by John Gould, who spent more than six decades working iron and steel there before the space eventually took on a new purpose as a gathering place for music and community.

We first learned of Dan completely by chance at a show he played in Ipswich about a year ago and have enjoyed following along ever since as he’s worked to build something special in the neighboring town of Topsfield.

While watching Crowes Pasture perform on Saturday night, I found myself thinking about this Substack and some of the themes we’ve been exploring here.

One song in particular caught my attention. They performed “High Wire” from their 2019 album “Slow It Down,” a song that traces the story of New York’s Twin Towers across nearly four decades. Told from a first-person perspective, it begins with Philippe Petit’s remarkable high-wire walk between the towers in 1974 and concludes with the tragic events of September 11, 2001, when the towers were lost forever, along with the lives of 2,753 people.

One of the things I find fascinating about our work at JG Autographs is that after nearly three decades of buying and selling historical autographs, documents, photographs, and artifacts, it sometimes feels like we’ve crossed paths with almost every notable historical figure or event imaginable.

As I listened, I found myself thinking about the various Philippe Petit pieces that have crossed our desks over the years. Then I started thinking about collecting in a broader sense.

What struck me was that Dan Pallotta of Goodfolk, along with Andy and Monique of Crowes Pasture, are collectors too.

Dan is collecting sold-out shows, a growing community of regular patrons, and helping audience members collect memories of their own. Goodfolk feels a bit like a time warp back to an earlier era, when local communities gathered together, supported one another, and small-town venues gave artists and musicians a place to share their work.

In a way, he’s carrying forward the spirit of the building’s original purpose. More than a century ago, John Gould worked within those walls forging iron and steel for the local community. Today, the building continues to serve the community, not through blacksmithing but through music, storytelling, and shared experiences, while preserving the local charm and sense of connection that made places like this so important in the first place.

And for Monique and Andy, they are collectors too. Not collectors of autographs, photographs, or historical artifacts, but collectors of experiences, memories, observations, and stories. The songs they write are really collections of moments from their lives: stories about family, immigration, the American experience, human rights, civil rights, the pandemic, and the turbulent times we all continue to navigate. Each song captures a moment, a feeling, or an experience that mattered enough to be remembered.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt very similar to why collectors collect in the first place.

A signed photograph preserves a moment. A handwritten letter preserves a thought. A historical artifact preserves a story. A song can do exactly the same thing.

Maybe that’s why collecting never really goes away. It isn’t actually about the objects themselves. The objects are simply the vessels that carry the stories of experiences, moments, and people through time.

At its core, collecting is about preserving memories, experiences, stories, and connections to the people and moments that shape our lives.

Some people do it with archives, photographs, documents, and artifacts.

Others do it with songs.

Either way, we’re all trying to hold onto something meaningful before time carries it away.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out Goodfolk and Crowes Pasture. Supporting local artists, musicians, venues, and creative communities is more important than ever.

Goodfolk
www.goodfolk.live
Instagram: @goodfollktopsfield

Crowes Pasture
www.crowespastureduo.com
Instagram: @crowespastureduo

And follow us at…

JG Autographs, Inc.
www.jg.limited
Instagram: @jgautographs

House of Roulx
www.houseofroulx.com
Instagram: @houseofroulx and @houseofroulxtradingcards

As longtime members of the Manuscript Society, all of us at JG Autographs were especially pleased to see this year’s gathering take place in our home state. The opening reception was held at Boston’s historic Omni Parker House, a fitting venue for an organization dedicated to preserving and studying the documents, letters, manuscripts, and autographs that help tell the story of our past.

Founded in 1948 as the National Society of Autograph Collectors, the Manuscript Society has spent nearly eight decades bringing together collectors, historians, archivists, dealers, and researchers who share a passion for preserving historical documents and the stories they contain. Today, it remains one of the most important organizations serving the manuscript and autograph collecting community.

The evening served as both a welcome gathering for members from around the country and a fundraising event for the Society, featuring a silent auction of donated historical material. Over the years, we have been proud supporters of the Manuscript Society’s fundraising efforts, helping sell hundreds of donated autographs, letters, and historical documents to benefit the organization. Several years ago, JG Autographs was selected by the Society as one of its official auction partners, allowing us to further support its mission through the sale of these important historical artifacts.

For the silent auction, we donated a lovely carte-de-visite of the Bunker Hill Monument. With this year’s meeting taking place in Boston and tied to the nation’s approaching 250th Anniversary, we wanted to make sure our donation reflected both our city and its Revolutionary history. Beyond helping raise funds for the Society, we thought it would also make a wonderful keepsake for the winning bidder to remember their trip to Boston. Few landmarks are more closely tied to the story of the American Revolution than the Bunker Hill Monument, which still stands today overlooking the site of one of the conflict’s most iconic early battles.

Beyond the auction itself, what makes events like this special is the opportunity to connect and reconnect with fellow collectors, dealers, scholars, and friends who share a common appreciation for history. In an increasingly digital world, there is still something uniquely meaningful about gathering around original documents and handwritten letters that have survived generations and continue to connect us directly to the people and events that shaped our world.

This year, it was great to catch up with Manuscript Society Vice President Peter Klarnet, whom I have known for many years and who also serves as Senior Specialist for Manuscripts and Printed Americana at Christie’s in New York. Peter also served as the auctioneer for the fundraiser auction and did an exceptional job calling the lots while keeping attendees engaged and enthusiastically bidding throughout the evening.

It was also a pleasure to meet Executive Director Diana Arfine for the first time after corresponding by email for many months. Likewise, it was wonderful to finally meet longtime Manuscript Society board member Robert Hopper and his lovely wife, Carol. Robert has been my primary contact within the Society for many years, and despite working together for so long, we had never actually been in the same room until this event.

With Boston serving as this year’s host city, and with the nation’s semiquincentennial on the horizon, the evening was a fitting reminder that history is not only preserved in museums and archives, but also through the efforts of collectors and organizations like the Manuscript Society that continue to safeguard these links to the past.

The one real destination on the radar was Outer Limits Gallery & Studios, a shop that has been a customer of House of Roulx for the past few years and, more recently, officially began carrying our artist trading card series in-store this past fall. I had never actually met owner Brad Nord in person, so it felt like a great opportunity to finally catch up, see the shop firsthand, and experience one of the more unique brick-and-mortar spaces carrying our products.

At the same time, it was also just a good excuse to take in some classic New England coastal scenery after a long winter. Sometimes the best trips are the ones with almost no real agenda beyond getting in the car and seeing where the road takes you.

If you have never been to Outer Limits Gallery & Studios and have even the slightest interest in art, designer toys, or subculture collectibles, the spot is absolutely worth the trip.

Admittedly, I have never really been much of a toy collector or even enthusiast myself. With all the collectibles, memorabilia, artifacts, trading cards, and art we handle across our businesses, toys just somehow ended up being one segment of the collecting world I never spent much time exploring. It was pretty much the first thing I said to Brad walking into the shop, which immediately led into almost an hour of him completely schooling me on the toy world, production processes, artists working in the space, the history behind it all, and in general giving me a 10,000-foot overview of the scene, or at least as much as you can cram into a 60-minute visit.

It was fascinating, and apparent that Brad knows that world as well as just about anyone.

One thing I’ve realized more and more over the years is just how many different subcultures exist within the larger world of art collecting, and the even larger world of collecting in general. Some of them barely overlap at all, almost existing in completely separate universes, while others have always been deeply connected and universally collected across multiple generations of collectors.

I always appreciate fellow entrepreneurs, and I generally find that my wheels start turning anytime I have conversations with like-minded thinkers, even when they exist in slightly different realms of the creative and collecting worlds.

Brad and I briefly discussed some possible collaboration ideas on the toy side of things, and I think collectors can probably look forward to something in the near future featuring the masterful toy production work of Outer Limits Gallery & Studios paired with an exclusive Roulx artist trading card release.

My brain immediately went to those classic 1990s Starting Lineup figures, where you’d get something like a Reggie Lewis figure packaged with a matching trading card, but reimagined through a modern art lens. Imagine a Scott Listfield or Mab Graves astronaut figure paired with an RTC card, all packaged together in a retro nostalgia-inspired blister pack. Or maybe even a full series of Victor Castillo characters alongside a matching card set, and even better, a chase for a hand-painted figure by the artist.

For everyone who made it this far into the read, turn on your imagination for a second and picture the classic Starting Lineup figure at left below, remixed through the lens of the Victor Castillo artwork at right. This should already exist, and somehow it doesn’t… so we very well might need to make that happen.

I’ll definitely be bringing it up with Victor later this week when we catch up to talk more about our Art-Dex series, as he’s wrapping up his signing this week.

Old Number Six Books, tucked away in Henniker, New Hampshire, is housed in what was once a 19th-century barn. Inside, it unfolds into something else entirely — a maze of what must be hundreds of narrow aisles, tucked-away rooms, winding turns, stacked shelves, hidden corners, and more than 150,000 books.

You move slowly. You scan spines. You notice things you weren’t looking for. And somewhere along the way, you start to realize that collecting — real collecting — isn’t about hunting down what you already know you want.

It’s about discovery.

Walking those aisles felt familiar.

Because in a lot of ways, this is exactly how JG started.

Long before online auctions, before acquiring lifetime collections, before any of this scaled into what it is today — it was digging through places like this. Bookshops, antique stores, flea markets. Pulling books off shelves not for the title, but for what might be inside. Flipping through pages hoping to find a signature that had been missed.

Most of the time, you’d find nothing.

But every once in a while, you’d find something incredible.

And that was enough to keep going.

That feeling — the possibility that something meaningful is hiding in plain sight — never really leaves you.

There was something particularly striking about the science fiction section.

Rows of worn hardcovers and paperbacks — rocket ships, strange worlds, imagined futures — all created decades ago, long before any of it felt remotely possible. The covers carried that raw, unfiltered imagination that defined an entire era.

Some of them felt like they could sit right alongside our Moon Patrol prints and card series. I almost wanted to FaceTime with MP and say, “Hey… did you create this Tom Swift cover back in 1954?”

Not because they’re the same — but because they share the same spirit. Bold ideas. Strong visual identity. A sense of wonder that isn’t trying to be perfect, just trying to be felt.

It’s a reminder that inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere.

It builds over time — shaped by what we see, where we go, and the objects that catch our attention along the way.

And in a lot of ways, that’s exactly where we find ourselves right now.

What we’re building with JG — and even more so with Roulx and Roulx Trading Cards — and what’s coming next is rooted in this same idea of discovery, connection, collaboration, and inspiration.

As a bit of a teaser for our Substack readers, we’ve been developing a new series called Vanguard — an intersection of Art & History, and a true convergence of JG and Roulx. It’s a big-picture project, a hybrid of both wings of the company — with JG sourcing the history and Roulx bringing it to life creatively — one we can’t wait to share more about in the months ahead.

At its core, it’s a card series designed to connect collectors not just to an image on cardboard, but to iconic figures — both well-known and obscure — to artists both classic and contemporary (for those following along… Mark Wagner among them, with others to be revealed), and to moments in history and culture. Something that, in its own way, becomes a small piece of culture itself.

We can only hope it feels like the kind of thing you might stumble across in a place like this 50 years from now.

Places like Old Number Six remind us that collecting isn’t just about ownership — it’s about connection.

Connection to time.

Connection to culture.

Connection to the people who made something because they felt compelled to create it.

Every worn spine, every stamped cover, every handwritten price inside a book — it all adds up to a kind of quiet history. A record of hands it’s passed through. Shelves it’s lived on. Moments it’s been part of.

And in a way, that’s the goal.

Not just objects.

But artifacts.

Things that feel like they belong to something bigger — something worth discovering, holding onto, and eventually passing along.

We’ll definitely be going back.

And next time, we’re bringing more time.

— Jared