Sami Schwanke/Winonan

Collecting things for the sake of personal enjoyment is a common human trait. Many people have collections of postage stamps, game cards or ceramic figurines. Sophie Kaplan, senior English and global studies major with a Japanese minor, has a few quirky collections.

For one thing, Kaplan has a collection of about 150 hotel key cards.

The collection started out as an accident.

“I forgot to give a key card back, so I thought, ‘hey, I can keep these!’” Kaplan said.

Because Kaplan and her family often traveled across the country and spent most of their time in hotel rooms, hotel key cards were a regular part of Kaplan’s life.

“When I was in elementary school, we temporarily lived in a hotel because we were moving to Minnesota and our house wasn’t ready yet,” Kaplan said. “The hotel thing was a big part of my life, because my dad was a pediatrician and went to a lot of conferences.”

Kaplan’s favorite keycard is one she obtained on her travel study, Survival in Tokyo, through Winona State University.

Kaplan’s largest collection, however, is her library of Japanese manga comics.

Manga are Japanese cartoons, comic books and animated films that come in a variety of genres.

“I grew up on anime and watched ‘Totoro’ every single day,” Kaplan said. “There was a book fair in fifth grade and there was a book there that you read backwards, which I thought was cool, and it looked like the shows I’d been watching, so I bought it, and, after reading it, bought other available manga,” Kaplan said.

This soon sparked an intense interest for Kaplan, who began saving up her allowance and holiday money to buy manga.

“I used to go to Barnes and Noble every year for my birthday, and I realized there was a whole section of manga,” Kaplan said. “I’d get a weekly allowance and save up whatever I could to buy them.”

According to Kaplan, manga series span from 1 to 30 or more volumes per series.

She had 950 volumes by the time she graduated from high school.

When Kaplan reached high school she began finding more people interested in manga and anime.

“I didn’t have a lot of people I could share them with because I lived in a small town,” Kaplan said, “But in high school I realized there was a lot more people than I realized that read manga, so I started a lending library.”

At that time, Kaplan said she had about 500 volumes and made a colorized catalog for people to go through.

Kaplan started with letting friends borrow the books and eventually started charging a 50-cent fee to pay for damages and to widen her audience.

“I was basically a manga peddler,” Kaplan said. “It was hush-hush because I was running the business out of the school.  I had an underground manga organization you could say!”

When Kaplan graduated high school, she resolved not to buy any more books to save up for college and even sold some. She continued to receive them from family and friends, which Kaplan said she doesn’t mind because she still reads them when she goes home.

One of Kaplan’s favorite parts about manga is the endless choices of genre.

“I have a lot of genres, like samurai, school, drama, action and sports. There’s bread-making, dog-training, farming; if you can think of a silly topic, it’s happened.”

Kaplan said her personal favorites were a couple of realistic romance series and a crime drama.

Overall, having collections is not only a testament to personal interest, but also a bridge to other people with the same interest. In Kaplan’s case, it was the key to building a community of quirky collectors.

Contact Sami at [email protected]