DETROIT -- After I wrote about a woman who saves strangers' discarded shopping lists, I asked to hear from other collectors.

Now I know about folks who collect not only matchbooks and blue-and-white teapots, but women's stiletto heels, sock monkeys, AOL CD come-ons, umbrella covers and bits and pieces of famous places in the world, including the Great Wall of China and the Paris tunnel where Princess Di met her death.

One 83-year-old woman wrote to say, however, that she collects only "dust and unopened boxes of Jell-O. I have every flavor."

This project was not intended to explain why people collect, but one fellow on an Internet forum said it "keeps me out of trouble [and] gives me something to focus my energy on.

"My girlfriend jokes that I will never cheat on her because I elect to stay home on a Friday night to organize my stuff rather than join my buddies at a bar."

The collectors here don't have elegant explanations, either. They call it fun, nothing more. They're proud of what they've achieved and don't mind showing it off.

Getting Kix from cereal

Bob Konrad doesn't eat breakfast.

But he keeps more than 2,000 boxes of cereal. Most -- 1,105, to be exact -- are displayed full and unopened on plain pine shelving in the warren of rooms he owns over a coffee shop in downtown Royal Oak, Mich.

The rest, duplicates, are stored in 170 identical plastic tubs to be sold, maybe, sometime, to finance his addiction.

He admits that's what it is. "I don't spend my rent money on cereal boxes," he said, but concedes he's out of control.

He's proudest of his cereal, a collection he started 18 years ago with one Wheaties box he liked. He can't remember which one.

But he also collects casino ashtrays, Hot Wheels cars, Pez dispensers, board games, poker chips, Big Boy banks, McDonald's Happy Meals toys, paper McDonald's sacks, matchbooks, plastic yard Santas and more.

In that respect, he is typical of many collectors: He can't stop at just one.

The problem, he said, is that people see his collections and seduce him to start others. For a living, he's a printer, owner of the Graphics Factory, which produces huge paper and vinyl banners. Customers turn the white handle on the fuchsia door at the sidewalk, climb his steep narrow stairs, reach the top and say "Holy cow!" and conclude he might want to collect something new.

"One customer saw my cereal collection and brought me an old board game," Bob shrugs. "I went on a two-year board game binge and now have 600."

His cereal boxes dominate his many little rooms, standing diagonally, like members of a chorus line, on shelf after shelf.

He accumulates them mostly from the local Wal-Mart, Meijer and Target. "I can't go shopping without going down the cereal aisle," he said, "to see what's new."

I learned from Bob's collection that most cereal companies put out seasonal boxes (Christmas Crunch, for example) and others they label "limited editions," like a 1998 World Cup Cheerios box shaped like a soccer ball.

He guesses his cereal is worth, all together, about $25,000, although he's never paid more than $40 for a coveted box on eBay. His prize possessions are two 1-ounce mini-boxes of Wheaties from the 1970s.

Finally, I press him about breakfast. Does he ever eat cereal?

Now and again, he concedes, he'll have Cocoa Puffs with chocolate milk. He's 56, you see, going on 12.

Mix-and-match dishes

From other people's castoffs, Debbie Chiesa has built a collection of bowls and orphaned wineglasses she hopes her friends will pick over after she dies.

"I've told them that I want each of them to choose a cookbook, a bowl and a wineglass to remember me by," said Debbie, who is a fit 51. Death does not appear to be stalking her, but she respects it, knowing that many of her most treasured bowls and glasses were cherished by people now alive only in memory.

"Isn't this beautiful?" she said to me, turning one crystal glass in the light of her Dearborn, Mich., kitchen. "It was probably a wedding gift to someone. Think of all the memories it holds! And I bought it for 25 cents."

She grew up in a household where everything matched. When she married, she took into her kitchen an old flowered pasta bowl of her mother-in-law's. The two began garage sale-ing. The bowls accumulated, mostly big bowls, bowls to hold pasta for 12 or potato salad for 20.

"When I take a dish to a potluck, I never worry about my bowl coming back to me, since I probably only paid a buck for it," she says. And, she has 70 more at home.

A friend even robbed a rental cabin of a bowl Debbie admired (replacing it, of course, with another). "Isn't it gorgeous?" she said, with a child's delight.

The wineglass collection began more recently, but has accumulated fast, to 152 glasses. Summer Saturdays always start with prowling garage sales.

Her collection includes fluted glasses, etched glasses, red and pink and green glasses, nothing odd, nothing weird, just lovely, classic vessels. She can't guess what any are worth, and doesn't care. Her obsession is not with value but beauty. She usually spends no more than a dollar for a glass.

In her kitchen we ping one glass after another with our fingers to hear the chimes of crystal. Each evening, as she prepares dinner, she chooses for her sauvignon blanc a glass to fit her mood. And when she invites guests for drinks or dinner, nobody ends up leaving inadvertent lipstick marks on somebody else's glass because everybody chooses a glass they'll recognize as their own.

As much as she loves them, each one for itself, she is not clingy, sharing them with friends or family in need. "I don't mind giving them away," she said, "because I'm constantly acquiring them."

She gave me two, she said, "to remember me by."

Brood brewed collection

Karen Fichtner's collection numbers 1,175 items. She carries it in her purse.

The items are words. To be specific, they are homonyms, words that sound identical but are spelled differently and have different meanings. She has listed them, almost entirely in pencil, on the A-through-Z pages of a small address book she bought in the summer of 2001 for that purpose.

You probably learned to recognize a few in grade school, as Karen did: sale/sail, bear/bare, sea/see. But then her sixth-grade nun asked her pupils to make a list.

Karen remembers writing down "reed/read" and thinking, "I bet I'm the only one that came up with that one."

More recently, as an adult in Plymouth, Mich., she began noticing them again. And one day she bought the address book.

That weekend, she took it with her to Wisconsin. At the kitchen table where she used to do her homework, she and her older brother and her dad stayed awake until the wee hours, drinking wine, then coffee, calling out homonyms.

The next night, they did it again, demanding credit for their finds. Her brother Paul even put three asterisks next to one of his proudest finds: radical/radicle.

Karen's collection is unusual in a few ways:

You cannot buy more on eBay, or anywhere.

It could easily be lost, but then largely rebuilt.

While some Internet homonym sites claim many more, Karen refuses to look at them. That would be cheating.

Her last find, a few weeks ago, was sitz/sits. Someday, however, her collecting will be over.

But/butt she's wise/whys. She knows/nose that all/awl good things must/mussed come/cum to/too/two an end.

Tags are it

That tickle, at the back of your neck? The label on the inside of your collar that won't behave itself?

Suzanne Turgeon wants it -- and the one inside your pants and coat, too.

Suzanne collects woven clothing labels of all colors, shapes and sizes. Because they're there. And Suzanne, a seamstress since age 6, hopes to make something from them someday.

Maybe a quilt, although she guesses she'd need 10,000 labels and has only about 4,000.

They're not well-organized, spread out on her dining room table in Brownstown Township, Mich., and on the air hockey table in the basement, in cardboard box lids and plastic food containers.

Some are duplicates, but many are not. She particularly treasures elaborate labels from older clothes and coats. When St. Vincent de Paul staged a 99-cent coat sale, she bought 50, took them home, snipped off the big, colorful labels, then drove the coats back to re-donate.

"I'm an expert with a razor blade," she told me, demonstrating how, with a dozen staccato touches of the blade, she removes the label from an old shirt in five seconds, so neatly you'd never know it was there.

Her collection began when she owned a maternity shop, selling new and used items for pregnant women and children. She noticed the playful tags -- M2B, Pickles & Ice Cream -- and began removing labels from clothes she couldn't sell but donated to charities.

Since then, she bought and runs a sewing shop. Customers bring her baggies of labels from their closets. Suzanne has mined not only her own wardrobe but her family's, including her husband's ties. I offered the label from my sweater and she snipped it right off.

At garage sales and thrift shops she hunts for cheap clothes with good labels. Getting them from pricey items is tougher.

A customer who brought in a Versace skirt for tailoring said no when Suzanne asked if she could take the tag.

"I wanted that label so bad," Suzanne sighed. "But somehow, someday, I'll get one."