Via Inverse.com:
It is probably safe to say that Steve Sansweet is the ultimate Star Wars fan. After years as a journalist, he joined Lucasfilm for what has got to be the greatest job title ever: Head of Fan Relations. During his time there he became an established author, penning definitive books about Star Wars fandom including the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, Star Wars: 1,000 Collectibles – Memorabilia and Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away, and others. He even helped launch StarWars.com. Through it all, he was the go-to voice that connected Lucasfilm to its most dedicated fans.
But when he retired in 2011, he found himself with a very geeky problem: Where would he put the literally hundreds of thousands of Star Wars collectibles he had amassed over the years? The answer to his action figures, movie art, and movie memorabilia storage problem was Rancho Obi-Wan, the non-profit museum Sansweet built to house his collection. Located in Petaluma, CA, fans can visit and tour what is the officially, according to Guinness, the world’s largest Star Wars memorabilia collection, and learn just what it means to be a Star Wars fan.
Inverse spoke to Sansweet about fandom, weird collectibles, and keeping a non-profit afloat.
When did you start collecting memorabilia?
I’ve been collecting since the beginning! I grew up loving science fiction and watching cheesy movies of the ‘50s and the TV shows of the ‘60s. I started to collect some older Japanese battery wind up robots and spaceships and things in the 1970s, and then Star Wars came out and blew me away. The merchandise became part of, and eventually overtook, my collection.
When did you realize your collection was becoming a significant part of your fandom?
It was when I was still a reporter and then a bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal. But collecting was totally separate from eventually working at Lucasfilm, and it just grew because I started meeting people there and began writing books about Star Wars.
There’s just something about Star Wars that was the right movie at the right time to just grab me. It was one of the first movies that had merchandising for it. In the ‘20s and ‘30s there had been Mickey Mouse toys, or others inspired by comic strips or Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, but not movies. It was very different from the way it is today.
