Wilkie's Wonderful World in Lunenburg closing after 32 years
It has everything from baseball cards to air fresheners, coins and video game controllers, but after 32 years in business, Lunenburg's iconic collectable shop is closing its doors.
Ian Wilkie, owner of Wilkie's Wonderful World, is packing up the store and retiring this week.
"Wilkie's Wonderful World is a place where an awful lot of young people had a lot of fun," he said Monday. "This is the home of their heroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman."
When he first bought the shop, it was a small comic book store.
Wilkie had a career as a banker and he wanted to make sure his new venture was a solid investment, so the world became comics, coins, cards and books.
"I thought I'd better add the names of the things I really know well — coins especially — so if the comics didn't make a go of it, I could fall back on the stuff I'm really good at," he said. "I guess it worked!"
It worked so well, Wilkie went on to own seven stores in the Maritimes, including locations in Moncton and Halifax.
He closed them all over the years and thought he would use his current space as a storage facility. That was, until he started unpacking the boxes.
"When it was all here I looked around and said, 'It looks like a store. Squeaks like a store. Unlock the door and you have a store.'"
Massive collection
Wilkie amassed his huge collection by buying items from his customers.
"When I thinking about all the boxes I've packed in the last few days, I think I must've said 'Yes' to everything. I think a part of me was still the banker helping people," he said.
"If someone came in and needed some money to do something, I think I bought it."
The collection includes thousands of sports cards, which are catalogued and alphabetized. He has hundreds of records, comic books and video games. He estimates there are 250,000 items in the store. All of it is now being packed into his car and moving home.
"I think today I am more sentimental than I've been," he said. "It finally hit me in the last 24 hours that I'm closing the chapter. It's a hard one to close, mainly because I really like people."
Wilkie says his favourite collection isn't material. It's the smiles he's received from thousands of customers over the years.
Wilkie isn't giving up on the collecting business forever — he hopes to sell the remaining items online.
