About this site and your web author
My name is Ed Welter and I am the creator and sole person that
maintains this site. I began collecting crayons and crayon boxes as
a hobby back in 2001 after having collected breweriana for several decades
before that. I stumbled on the hobby by
accident after having received an old box of crayons from an auction for
something else I had won. I’d just sold
off my breweriana collection and had all of these empty shelves that I had made
for beer cans. The breweriana collecting
had gotten too expensive and my collection too saturated. It was also very competitive; a lot of other
collectors had more time, energy and money to devote to their collecting.
Having the old box of Crayola crayons reminded me of
coloring when I was a kid and stayed over at my grand-parents house. I began to wonder how many different crayon
boxes there were. I also wondered if
anyone else collected them. I liked that
it was a collectible hobby which relatively few have discovered or
considered. That made it much easier to
acquire the crayon boxes. Of course,
that came with a flip side too; nothing about the history of the crayon had
been written and I didn’t know how many companies made crayons or what type of
products there were to collect.
I began to research crayons right away put together my
own guidebook to keep track of what I had and what I did not. This proved to be problematic because there
were just too many unknowns and my compilation changed every month. Instead, I switched to using this website as
a means to track them and at the same time it provided a reference source for
other collectors.
This site started back in 2003 as the “Virtual Crayon
Museum” and morphed into crayoncollecting.com during a site makeover back in
2009. Because I am only one person,
rarely does anything ever get completed.
There are still pages on this site with the original web design. I changed most of the key pages but there are
hundreds if not thousands of pages buried in this site.
The more research I did on crayon products and history
the more I began to realize that it was a piece of American history whose story
hadn’t been told; at least in a holistic way.
I visited the National Archives at the Smithsonian back in 2004 to
research the Binney & Smith (now Crayola) collection they had. While the documents were very useful for
putting together a timeline of their products, the physical crayon box assets
were only a fraction of what I already had.
Somewhere along the lines I changed my motivation from that of a mere
collector to that of a historian. Not a
week goes by that I don’t get one or several inquiries about a box of crayons
and folks wanting to know values and ages and context behind the history.
Along the way I met a number of other crayon
collectors and together we formed a cyber-club called “Crayon Collecting Club”
dedicated to those that love all things crayon.
For a national collecting club, our memebership was always small but
there was a lot of good collecting discussion back in those days. With technology changes, the group sort of
faded away. Then another collector,
Jenny, started a Facebook group for crayon collectors called just that: “Crayon Collectors”. This is now where all the crayon collectors
are; sharing photos and discussions related to the hobby. It’s a good place to buy/sell beyond the eBay
and Etsy options.
Many of the collecting club members collect Crayola
exclusively and only focus on the color names that Crayola has used over the
years. Their influence got me curious
about the history of the colors and in 2011 I compiled a comprehensive 40+ part
chronological history of the color names from what they started with in 1903 to
what they have current day. The history
was complex and confusing and had I not personally owned the majority of the
colors and boxes the story might never have been done accurately.
I had been on a crusade for some years to correct so
much of the inaccurate crayon information that propogates on the internet. I rewrote the Wikipedia crayon article and
co-wrote the Crayola article with another collector. I donated pictures into the Wikipedia public
domain of various historic crayon boxes.
I wanted to embark on cleaning up the Wikipedia Crayola color list article
but the data was such a mess that until I had completed my own history there
was no way to redo that one as so much of my work was original research.
After doing the Wikipedia articles, I expanded the
history of the crayon with a series that took it from its earliest influences
up to the 1920s where I stopped temporarily because copywrite laws made it
difficult to find enough research material to be able to properly tell the
story further. After that I chronicled a
comprehensive list of color names (not just Crayola) known.
In 2014 I retired at the age of 53, sold everything
and moved to the South of Spain with my wife to begin a life of global travel
and experiences. I sold the Crayola
portion of my crayon collection to Crayola.
It has now become their corporate archive. Prior to this, they had very few physical
products of their history. More
importantly, their historian at the time really wanted my data and research
information as they lost a lot of their historical source material in floods. I was happy the physical boxes will be used
toward retro-inspired products at Crayola in the future. The non-Crayola items got dispersed among
many collectors; some friends of mine.
After four years in Spain and traveling all over Europe, we moved to
Guadalajara, Mexico where we continue our travel and life adventures.
These days I collect digitally. I still save photos of any new crayon
container I see or people send to me and I document them here on the website
for future collectors. I will continue
with projects for this site along with various media and historic
endeavors.
Media Links for Ed Welter:
Oregonian
Article – In the spring of 2010 the Oregonian newspaper did a full page
feature on me and my collection. This is
the internet version of that article.
AM Northwest – In
fall of 2010 a local feature TV show did a five minute segment of me and my
collection. This is the video.
Documentary
Film – In the winter of 2010/2011 Patrick Rosenkranz used my collection and
thoughts as part of his documentary on Collectors. This is a segment.
Collectors
News June 2011 – Page 1
Collectors
News June 2011 – Page 2
– I wrote a two page article on crayon
collecting for Collectors News. These
are the scans of that article.