I am born on October 29th, 1958 and am raised in Belgium (Flanders), where I still live. I’m married with Carin, a Dutch (but now Belgian) woman who I have met during a trip around Cuba in 1998.

 

In the beginning of 2005 I started to collect business cards.

At that moment I did have already about 1000 pcs. received at work, as a souvenir from my travels to stick in my photo-album, from restaurants, fair trade visits, etc. 

This moment my collection contains almost 500.000 different cards from different (ex-)countries or autonomous regions. There a lot of countries that became another name, there are countries that splitted and there are simply just new countries. See Overview.

 

But the real start was at the “holiday fair” of Utrecht (NL) in 2005 at the stand of the small but very rich country Brunei.

I became a gold-coloured pin with the name Brunei on it.

When I came home I did send an email to the sultan, the head of state of Brunei, to ask for his business card.

I never received any reaction on it.

But to pass the time (and you also can see it as a kind of therapy) I started to mail all kinds of people and organisations to ask them for business cards, as well “normal people” as the “famous ones”.

 

The answers on the mails varied from no reaction to angry mails, but also to a lot of positive reactions.

So this became a real hobby, even a kind of madness which helps me to forget my pain.

Radio stations asked me for an interview, television channels made a which has lead to a lot of new cards.

Some newspapers and magazines did write several articles.

I also placed some free advertisements on websites in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, …….

The result is that some people in above mentioned countries do send me cards on a regular basis.

Above this I do have a number of “colleagues” all over the world through the IBCC (International Business Cards Club) to trade with.

 

Most of the cards are of course made of paper but I also do have them made out of plastic, wood, leather, aluminiumfoil, tri-dimensional, and name it…

 

And I have cards in different languages? Yes, of course. Dutch, French, English, German, Russian, Danish, Iceland, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish,, Slovakian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Fries, Korean, Japanese, Chinees, Maori, Mongolian, Welsh, Irish, Arabic, …..

  

You have cards in the normal rectangular form but also cards in special forms. It's just a matter of asking special attention.

 

Classifying ?

 

You can classify the cards in different ways. Because I collect all kind of cards , I have only one choice . All cards are sorted by country, by post- or zipcode, by number of telephone.

A work like for monks.

 

 

What is the purpose ?

My biggest wish is to have at least one card from each country or autonomous region in the world.

Also I would like to have more cards from famous persons (or as an alternative a hand-signed photo). This would give an extra dimension to my collection.

 

But we want to become as much cards as possible. It doesn’t matter how it looks. There may be a staple in it, or something hand written on it, it may look a little used, all cards are more than welcome.

 

So if you read this:  

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Please stop throwing away cards, but send them to Tony.

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Thank you.