Big Tim deeply appreciates the work that Big Little Tim and Ray have put into tidying up the store, but if we are honest with ourselves, the place still looks like a hoarder’s garage. It began that way, after all, when Big Tim—a lifelong collector, hoarder and picker himself—started selling things out of his garage at home. A storefront was the next step up.
Bulls Head Treasures is a 30-minute drive from Poughkeepsie in the small town of Stanfordville, New York. It is a cozy place, but this vibe was not curated. It is a massive, massive collection of things. It is 7,200 square feet of old fancy china, glassware, army equipment, posters, framed paintings, a 1695 Gutenberg Bible, rare baseball cards, sterling jewelry, film cameras in leather cases, dolls, die-cast cars, engravings, brass signs, lamps, dressers, fishing rods and, curiously, a shirt that says “Hex the Patriarchy.” Once, while I was wandering through the store, an elderly couple entered. The husband paused a few feet from the door, and as his wife walked ahead of him, he said, “Hold on, Sally. This is all too much to handle.”
There are three pillars of Bulls Head Treasures. There is Big Tim, who founded the place eight years ago. There is his son, Big Little Tim, who later joined the operation. His name was initially just Little Tim, but then, he got bigger than his dad. Then there is Ray, a recent retiree who volunteers at the store and has quickly become integral to it. The Tims have recently coerced him into taking gas money for his services. Ray also repairs lamps.
The store has gained something of a cult following, entirely by word of mouth. “People will come from Jersey once a month, from Connecticut—we get a lot of Connecticut,” says Ray. People come to Bull’s Head on vacation or on recommendation from family nearby; many leave wishing they had more space in their return carry-ons. It is the kind of place that is hard to leave empty-handed. Many return customers buy on house tabs that the guys keep tallied on notepads. Purchases are only recorded by hand. A lot of the business relies on trust. The store has free coffee in the back for customers or anyone at least willing to stay for a chat. When Big Tim started the store, he made the coffee for himself, but he was not going to finish a whole pot alone.
On the day of my most recent visit, Big Tim had his day off, so it was just Ray and Big Little Tim—B.L.T., as his dad calls him on the store’s Facebook. Ray had on jeans, a Carhartt jacket and a hat that said “Shop Stanfordville.” B.L.T. had on a hoodie and a hat that said “Don’t Tread on Freedom.”
The three of us were talking. B.L.T. looked at Ray and grinned sort of mischievously. “Can I tell him that thing we always say?”
Ray nodded.
“It’s a good day—wait, what is it? It’s a good day when we can put some cash in the drawer and get some shit out the door.”
Bulls Head has many other sayings. Some favorite repeated phrases from the store’s Facebook, which is run by Big Tim: “No running in the halls.” “The bigger your pile, the bigger your smile.” And the classic: “If it fits in your car, it is on sale.”
The whole Facebook, actually, is a delight—it makes clear, above all else, that the proprietors of Bulls Head are having a really good time. There is a picture of a stained glass panel with the caption “SWEET !!!” Small cast-iron pans hang against the wall: “We do have pan pan, but no pizza pizza.” Business notices: “Remember , 10 to 6 today we are here to get our ‘Treasures’ to their next stage of preservation !!!! Brad , come get the platter before someone else does !!! Butcher cast iron plaque gone , your fault. LOL.” And the perennial: “Ray has decided yet again we need more room for fresh finds.”
In that last post, we see the philosophy of the place laid bare. Purchases at Bulls Head Treasures do not seem to be about revenue. Rather, they clear room for more treasures. The more time that one spends at Bulls Head, the more one realizes that it only operates as a store because such a situation keeps the whole thing going: the hunt for more finds and more things to marvel at. Ray and B.L.T. enthusiastically told me about a mysterious but well-made box with a plunger and razor blade that, for months, they could not identify for the life of them. One day, a few months later, a customer saw it and remarked, in passing, “Oh, that’s a funny pencil sharpener.”
The store has a somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards pricing. Most items are unmarked. The first time I came in, I brought a shirt and some books and CDs to the counter. Big Tim, at the register, looked at the shirt for a few seconds and gave me a rather low price for it. I asked about the books and CDs, and he waved his hand: “Don’t worry about it.”
Ray seemed restless, and he and I took to wandering around the store. He spoke about the store, and the Tims, with reverence. “This is the kind of place I go when I go on vacation,” he said. He remains, insistently, a volunteer, though he now owns some equity in the store. Ray told me that it was only after he offered to look through the books recently that they found out the store was making money. This has never affected their willingness to cut deals.
“I’ll knock the price in half when it’s kids,” Ray said to me. “It’s such a thrill to see someone eight, 12 years old, collecting things. It’s a lost art, really.” Ray himself started collecting vintage lighters when he was around that age. He now has 500 and struggles to find space for them. He has brought home carved wooden ducks and die-cast cars and even a handmade table from the store—paid for, of course. He regrets nothing.
Our conversation, though, kept circling back to a house five miles down the road. Ray and B.L.T. were taken to look through it after an elderly couple they had distantly known had passed away. The couple had been hoarders too, and the collection they left behind was so large that it took the two guys four months to comb through all of it. And despite the mold-related cough Ray picked up, those four months seemed like heaven. “Boy, we had fun,” he told me. “Every once in a while, you’d hit something extraordinary. I’d be wrapping up stuff and I’d hear, ‘Ray, Ray, come over here!’ And it’d be, like, some solid bronze horse. And we’d both be able to appreciate that, you know, and we’d look at each other like, ‘We’re taking this. We’re taking this.’”
They got upwards of 1,500 items from that house, including sets of hundreds of die-cast cars and ceramic horses. Some of those sold for a pretty penny on eBay—which Bulls Head uses, semi-reluctantly. In a store where every single customer gets greeted at the door, the shift to the impersonality of online shopping is rather stark.
“This business would be so much easier in a steel building with just a computer,” Big Little Tim said. Their margin is much higher on eBay; they make more money there. But the physical store is going nowhere. The guys are, simply, having too much fun. It is impossible to spend more than 10 minutes inside the store without hearing the ding of the front doorbell and a “Oh, hi Bill, how’s it going?” or a “Hey there, Donna!” The returning customers, the inevitable conversation when a customer admires a particular find or asks about an object’s history, the chances for a collector to show off their collection—these, really, are the point.
Nothing, I have learned, makes a collector’s face light up more than the chance to talk about their collection—or more generally, about their love for things. At Bulls Head, people get to light up over and over—from the fellow-traveler hoarders to curious onlookers to young collectors-in-training. It is all about the hunt and the mutual appreciation for the hunt. It is about admiring things old and well-crafted and seeing them, as Big Tim put it, “to their next stage of preservation !!!!”
Ray, for his part, could not be happier. He has found his place. He told me: “I’m gonna do this until I can’t anymore.”