Paul Fonoroff organized programs and tickets in a filing cabinet. As the collection grew, he began storing movie magazines and posters in bookshelves in his Hong Kong apartment. And, when a downstairs apartment became free, he snatched it up and had bookcases and poster cases built to hold his materials. “Gradually the collection just took over everything,” Fonoroff explains. “It required two apartments and I was very lucky in a place like Hong Kong, where it’s so expensive, to be able to have two apartments to keep the collection in.”
There are two rules of collecting, Fonoroff says. First, you have to be very passionate about it. And, second, you have to collect something no one else cares about. “I had no competition,” he laughs.