I've never considered my collection of old cameras as a Collection because I never "collected" them. I just find myself captured by them from time to time in the flaky low-rent sections of flea markets, far from the smooth guys selling furniture and framed engravings slashed from the pages of ancient reference books. They're next to the bin of cast-iron kitchen implements and a rack of mildewed dresses with dim, scaly rhinestones.

The cameras have cracked leather skin wrapped around a solid metal shell, soft in the hands but almost indestructible. It's a cyborg from the 1920's. Pop a small catch and the front panel opens, extending the bellows and front lens out of the case. Owing to the optics and film sizes of the time, this camera needed a long focal distance, which might have made it a cumbersome and unwieldy device. So this camera was designed to fold in on itself, compressing all the volume needed for it to function into a virtual space that unpacks itself at the touch of a button. The fine steel gears click perfectly and the aperture seals behind the scuffed lens, the eye of an old half-blind creature. The black bellows exhale the promise of chemicals and leather.

So from time to time a camera is irresistible. We put some of the more interesting ones in a glass-front cabinet in the living room and I look at them all the time. One of my favorites is a simple box camera, nothing more than a lightproof housing for a medium-format film roll, a ratchet to advance the frames, and a spring-loaded shutter. No lens, no focal mechanism; it's just a modestly advanced version of a pinhole camera. You see lots like this kicking around in flea markets, sometimes thrown into a bin together. For their age and antique status, they are so common as to be almost without commercial value. I picked this one up about ten years ago.

But this box camera a little different from the others. The leather covering is a light-brown color (most of the box cameras were stained black) and there is a silver medal stamped on the side that says "Fiftieth Anniversary of Kodak 1880-1930." I bought this camera in part because it uses 110 film, a format still in use today, and I wanted to see what kind of images it would produce decades after this design was superseded by more complex technology. I also nursed a hope that the camera might be worth something, and that at $12 it was a "find."

We often sense when it's best not to test the wedge of hope against the grain of reality, and in this case I didn't bother to ascertain the camera's value for many years. But eventually it occurred to me as I sat in front of my computer to check the arbiter of common desire-based valuation, eBay. Of course I discovered that the camera had almost no net worth on the market. No Antiques Road Show fairy tale for me. After a moment of disappointment, I felt a measure of relief. Protecting an investment is often a terrible burden. I'd opened this camera up, loaded film, clicked the shutter, wound the film on the aging gears, and otherwise treated it as a functional object and not as a valuable antique. It sits in a glass cabinet where its leather case is exposed to light. Discovering it had commercial value would immediately remove it from the realm of the useful, the physical. It would be transfigured and become holy through the godly power of the money it could command. Learning that it a common object in your house was priceless would be like hearing that your kid has inexplicably been selected to be the next Dalai Lama.