Hi,

 My name is Juan Domingo Ventura, I’m 53, I’m married and I have one daughter and two sons. I’m Dr. Industrial engineering, I live in Badalona, a city near Barcelona ( Spain ) and I have to say that I’m very glad for having been call to talk about my collection.

 I collect tickets of public transport  from the hole world.

 My father started the collection in 1953 (1) by making one including  the 100.000 different numbers (2). He was a doctor and he started collecting tickets when he was studying at the Faculty of Medicine in Barcelona, and during this period almost every student provided him with tickets. He died fifteen years ago, and at that time he got a collection with 84.000 tickets and lost of repeated ones.

 I continued the collection. Nowadays the collection with the 100.000 numbers is finished,  it took me one year to find the last number that I had missed ( 62.112 ), I found it last year.

 I have extended the collection, first by making different ones of palindromes (3). I have 33 collections of this kind of tickets, for instance, I have one with tickets from Argentina (4) now finished thanks to the Círculo de Coleccionistas de Capicúas de Buenos Aires (CCC) collaboration  http://www.coleccionistas.4t.com , which I belong to.  I’m also making  ticket collection based on different concepts of number or set ( pitys (5), reiteratives (6), sets (7) ... ), and one collection with different kinds of tickets from de whole world (8).  In all, I own more than 600.000 tickets, in tidy and classified albums.

 For me, my collection is not just a big box  plenty with lots of things , I like to have it classified and  documented. If we are talking about numbers or sets, their classification are quite easy. What I have done to classify tickets is: divide them by different countries, then cities, then companies or lines, then printers, fare and antiquity...

 With the aim to classify just Barcelona tickets I have been working for four years in the cataloguing of all the tickets of this city ( that means catalogue 40.000 different tickets from 1872 (9)  to nowadays (10) ). Of a result of this work a first volume of this classification has been published (11). I hope that in a not very long future I will open a web in which people will be able to consult this work freely. This is an investigation work due to the fact that nothing else is written on this matter.

  Lots of collectors have told me to show my collection somehow, but I have to say that the only way is visiting me, coming to my house where I have one room just dedicated to it ( my tickets and their classification fill 18m2 of shelves ). More than one collector has spent one evening with my collection and has realized that this time wasn’t enough.

 On the other hand I have always handed over my collection to whom has asked me for it. If you can spend a few days visiting Barcelona you will find part of my collection exposed in one of ours railway station in Barcelona, the one called Tarragona during the first quarter of the 2000. But if you aren’t able to come,  you can also make a virtual visit in Internet ( I recommend you  the web of one friend Portuguese of mine, Álvaro Días   http://www.oocities.org/aldias47/ where you can see an example of my collection together with other collectors ).

 One question that many people ask me is where I found all the material that I need. I have to say that I had a very good started with the collection my father gave me, then I have spent hours searching in shops or street markets for tickets or even completed collections, here in Barcelona ( which is one of the most important places for collectors in Spain ) or in others cities. Lately, Internet has  been the great source for taking contact with collectors from the hole world thanks to internet pages like http://www.acoleccionar.com.ar and  http://www.oocities.org/aldias47/  where you can find others Internet address  thanks to the links  of Álvaro Días. I have also joined different associations like CCC http://www.coleccionistas.4t.com which are related with my hobby.

 Thanks to all this facts, my collection is growing day by day, I have made friends from the hole world with whom I make swapping and my hobby has become a great entertainment without spending lots of money.

 I want to give my regards to all the tickets collectors from my city ( Badalona ), and I want you to know you can get in touch with me for any question or for swapping. My e-mail address is pro2010@yahoo.es .

 Juan Domingo