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| Paul Bertin looks down the barrel of his training riffle. It isn’t working at the moment but he hopes to repair it sometime in the future. |
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| Dennis Bertin’s favourite statue he owns of the X-Men Character Cable. One of the few statues he owns that he believes will never leave his shelf. |
By: Tony Bourgeois
Woodstock- Collecting could be considered a brotherhood, especially for Paul and Dennis Bertin.
Everybody has hobbies. Whether it’s reading, writing, or collecting it’s just something people do for fun.
In the case of the Bertin brothers of Moncton, they take their collecting hobbies to a whole other level.
Dennis Bertin is considered a collector, today his collection occupies not only the majority of his room but many boxes on one a very large pallet in the garage which creates a small mountain as testament to his collection. He had to move back home due to some issues with a roommate and his collection was too large to actually fit in the house. He believes when he was young, kids were trained to collect things which started him off.
“Pretty much everyone my age has some kind of collecting quirk,” said Bertin. “We all started off the collection habit with Pokémon (cards). I was the weird kid out though because I never did get Pokémon. For me, it was getting Star Wars collectables, be it anywhere from cards to action figures.”
Gathering those small collectibles was just the beginning for Bertin. He now is the proud owner of a massive collection of comics, video games and statues. His first real collector’s item was the comic, which started his obsession and made his old apartment like a bat cave of geeky items.
“When I started making money, I started a small collection of comics; it wasn’t so much a collection as much as I was just buying comics as a kid,” he said. Bertin says his first real dedicated collection started when he was twelve. Like a crow to shiny objects he felt himself drawn into hockey cards. He says he had collected several thousand hockey cards in those early years.
It seemed that Denis Bertin’s collection habits go by his source of income. When he started mowing lawns and making money it opened the flood gates to the first of his big three obsessions he has today.
“After the hockey cards then started the video games, because I started to work and I learned I was making a lot of money, and ended up buying my play station and started buying games for that and then a lot that started coming out like the Final Fantasy games started to get popular. Then I worked my way up to my PS2 and started buying a lot of games for that to,” said Bertin. “I learned that a lot of these older games have a lot of value and had a collection of older games because I never sold any of them. I noticed they were valuable so I started looking around at stores because stores at the time didn’t know the value yet.”
Learning the true value of some of his collectables was the starting point for Bertin making money from his obsession. Bertin also learned to spot a deal, get a discount, save a few dollars while collecting, a skill he continues to use as he soldiers on to add on to his growing collections. Anytime you see him in a store he’s usually talking to the owners, making connections to find out when the good stuff comes in and hoping for special deals as well.
Soon after Bertin started collecting classic games, he began collecting the systems as well. The first addition to this collection was an Atari computer he got from his grade 10 English teacher, Mr. Campbell. Campbell gave it to him after Bertin wrote an essay about classic games that he said really showed how passionate he was for the old machines most people have stored in their basements or would sell at their next garage sale.
Bertin says his statue collection started out because of a bad habit of buying things he couldn’t afford.
“Literally it started with just buying a few anime figures on EBay and I had a little collection there,” he said. “Of course we had local conventions and I noticed there were bigger ones and I got them at discounted prices. Over time I had a fair amount of old anime collectables.”
He said once his interest in anime faded and hebecame more interested in American comics. Once again the obsession switched genres.
While collecting, Bertin learned to hunt to a good deal, almost never paying full price for his statues. Part of what makes collecting so much fun for him is knowing the value will only go up if he takes good care of them.
Already, there are some figures he paid $100 for that are currently being bought on EBay for over $300 now. Although there is a profit to be made from selling some collectables, he said there are some that are far too precious to part with.
“The ultimate example of that would have to be my Cable statue. Cable’s a character from X-men. He’s my favorite character and they only created one statue for him.”
Bertin says regardless of the limited quantity of the statue, there is no profit to be made by hanging onto it. Not being able to make a profit from selling the X-men character doesn’t bother Bertin as he is more than happy to display proudly at his home. The old soldier holding a gun non-existent in a factual world protecting the little red headed baby can always be found in a place of honor in his home.
Dennis Bertin is not alone in his collecting habit. His brother Paul also has a collecting hobby. The younger Bertin said his habit started by wanted to learn about the history behind the collectables as opposed to the price tag.
Paul Bertin is a university student majoring in History and is an avid collector of military memorabilia. Paul said it’s not the items that are his obsessions but the events that surround them.
He showed up in full German uniform he purchased. Tick, tick, tick, with every step from all the bayonets, knives, and other assorted pieces of his collection hitting together as he carried them.
“I started getting interested in history back in high school,” said Bertin. “Whenever we talked about the First World War, or Second World War, the Cold War, anything of the sort, I was really drawn into it and I felt a sense of national pride whenever Canada was mentioned.”
Soon after graduation, he acquired the first part of his collection: a few commemorative post Second World War Soviet medals. They may not have been worth much, but since finding those medals, he has obtained bayonets, knives, shells and uniforms. Bertin says after every find he has a ritual he always goes through with each item.
“Every single item I get my hands on, I look up what it is. Like right know, I’m holding a bayonet.” He said examining the antique blade in his hands. “It’s about two feet long in total, and just by looking at the surface of it, you can see there’s a little C shape with an arrow in it. So I figured out that was and still is the Canadian forces symbol and there is also a date on it, 1907, and through the magic of Google and image recognition, I found out this is a LE Enfield First World War bayonet.”
He hasn’t found anything owned by anyone high ranking or well known like Hitler or Stalin, but hopes someday to find such a treasure.
Both Bertin brothers have extensive collections, each with their own reasons behind collecting: One for his love of history and knowledge and the other for the love of the search and the love of all things geeky; One intends to sell a chunk of his collection to buy more while the other intends to keep everything and use them as teaching props after graduation. Which collection is of higher value? Both cost a lot of time and money, but both have significant value to each collector. Neither brother can see the other giving up anytime soon.
