Pawn Shops and Curiosities

There’s a definite appeal about pawn shops that speaks to a kind of carnival spirit in everyone. On a very basic level, the idea of a place where one can Sell Gold has a very visceral appeal, and speaks to basic needs of people to feel secure having money in their pockets. At the same time, there’s also something of the mysterious and the unknown about them.

For some people, the idea of a pawn shop has a contemporary touch, where it’s a place where one can do easy on-line transactions that are beneficial to both parties. But the physical pawn shop often has the same mystique of the curio shop . Here, one can find very old items that have interest not based on economic value, but on their unusual nature. It’s like the vast second hand store in dreams, the kind of thing that Borges would write about. There’s also the idea that, one day, one will find a certain lost object from childhood, that will make a chaotic life into a perfect circle.

Imagine a store where a collector traveled the world looking for the most unusual things he could find. It becomes a kind of storehouse of culture, and it’s also a kind of ethereal notion that does carry over to pawn shops . One never knows what they’ll find, but they usually know what they’re hoping to sell.