A Japanese man who spent a whole year fishing small pebbles out of the soles of his sneakers may have inspired a new bobby in his home country.

Neruno Daisuki, an illustrator and manga artist from Japan, recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after showing off the collection of pebbles and glass fragments he fished out of the soles of his shoes over the last year. You know, small stones get stuck in the grooves of our footwear soles all the time, but who would ever think of collecting them? Well, this guy did, and after a year of painstaking work, Daisuki showed off his collection of 179 pebbles, 32 glass fragments, and 1 nut.

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Percival Lugue, a graphic artist from the Philippines, has been collecting toys from various fast food chains since he was just 5-year-old. Now, at age 50, he holds the Guinness Record for the most fast food toys in the world, over 20,000 of them.

Lugue has held the record for the largest collection of fast food toys since 2014, when his tally stood at around 10,000 unique items, but he has been busy consolidating his record ever since, and now he has more than 20,000 toys. Like any child, he always liked playing with the toys he got with his fast food meals, but he always took care of them, so he was able to start his epic collection pretty early. Over the years, he has collected new items from various fast food chains, like McDonald’s, Burger King and even the Philippines’ favorite brand, Jollibee, and compares the excitement of adding a new toy to his collection to experiencing Christmas morning as a kid.

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When receiving an order from Amazon, most people throw way the packaging box immediately, but one Japanese man loves Amazon boxes so much that he has spent the last 9 years collecting them.

So what posses a man to start collecting Amazon cardboard boxes? In the case of Kosuke Saito, from Osaka, Japan, it was the discovery of a pattern of numbers. It all started one day, in 2008, when, while unpacking an Amazon product, he noticed the serial number “XM06” on the packaging and remembered seeing “XM08” on another Amazon box. That got him thinking that if there was an XM06 and an XM08, surely there must be an XM07 as well. He wanted to know what that box was like, but it was only the beginning, because he soon discovered that Amazon boxes come in all shapes and sizes, and he was curious about all of them.

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James Phillips, from Three Forks, Montana, has been collecting shed antlers for over half a century now. The 66-year-old takes long hikes in the foothills of the mountains, looking for antlers to take home. Over the last six decades, he has collected over 16,000 individual pieces that now cover virtually every inch of a specially constructed 30 x 64 foot building known as Antlerman’s Shed.

Antlerman recalls that his passion for collecting sheds began in 1958. “I, as a ten year old, took a short walk from my parents’ homemade trailer up a creek into the timber,” he wrote on his website, Antlerman.com. “I stumbled onto an old set of elk antlers and packed them back to camp. A few days later I hiked a little further and brought home a couple old white elk antlers. To this day, when I find a shed I get the same rush as I did then. Antler hunting is in my blood.”

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Bill McBride, from Washington DC, is the proud owner of the world’s largest collection of Darth Vader memorabilia. The 42-year-old Star Wars fan has been working on the massive collection for the past 20 years, spending over $280,000 on 60,000 items including figurines, artwork and replica lightsabers.

Bill’s obsession with the iconic Star Wars villain began when he was five years old. “The moment Darth Vader burst on screen in Star Wars, I was immediately a fan of the character,” he said. “When you have the imposing, powerful presence of David Prowse, the other-worldly voice of James Earl Jones, all wrapped up in one of the coolest, most amazing costumes in movie history, you can’t help but fall in love.”

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58-year-old oil investor Richard Gibson has one of the weirdest collections in the world. For the past 36 years, he has been religiously saving all his toenail clippings in a glass jar.

Collecting toenails is a strange hobby, but Richard says that he didn’t exactly plan for it – it sort of happened as a result of his curiosity, and he just never stopped. He happened to be clipping his nails one day in February, 1978, and instead of throwing them out, he just put them in a manicure box. He then started doing it repeatedly, just to see how long it would take to fill up the box. That didn’t take too long – only two years – and by then he was pretty much hooked. So he moved his collection to a large glass jar, which is what now uses to put the clippings in.

“I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson admitted. “It’s well into the thousands.”

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Zhang Wei, a retired soldier from Qingdao city, China’s Shandong Province, is a huge fan of Transformers. The 38-year-old has been collecting Transformers models of varying sizes since 2002. And when he got married, his wife joined him with great enthusiasm. Today, the couple’s home is filled with a massive collection of 380 models worth a whopping US $32,000.

Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, Red Spider, Metroplex and pretty much every other transformer feature in Zhang’s collection, neatly arranged on special shelves fitted on to his living room walls. His favorite pastime is to dismantle each model and assemble it again.

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Jian Yang, a 33-year-old man from Singapore, has enough dolls to open a museum or at least a super awesome girls’ playhouse. The “toy nerd”, as Yang describes himself, has no less than 9,ooo dolls: 6000 of them are Barbie dolls, and the 0ther 3,000 are other types of girly dolls, such as Bratz Girls and Monster High. His huge collection is valued at about $500,000.

Yang’s passion for dolls began in his childhood days, when he wanted a doll but wasn’t allowed to have one. As he recalls, “before I knew anything about social norms, I was a boy that watched this on TV, liked it and wasn’t allowed to have one. As I grew older, got my own allowance, that’s where I started getting the freedom to buy whatever I wanted”. Step by step, a simple wish became a “crazy obsession”. His friends support him, his family have understood and learned to accept his passion, but his love life is affected, since his girlfriends see the the doll collection as the competition. As Yang confesses, “I’ve also got the ex-girlfriends who get insecure about this kind of stuff … They look at dolls and go ‘OK, that’s the competition’, which is quite troubling but it’s a reality”.

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For 57-year-old Harry Sperl of Daytona Beach, Florida, burgers are not only a tasty fast-food treat, but also representations of American popular culture that deserve a shrine. “They taste good, they look good and the hamburger is an icon of the United States of America”, explains Sperl. This is the reason why for the last 23 years, this burger enthusiast has been adding hundreds of items to the “Burgerbilia”, the world’s first (and, so far, only) burger museum, located in Sperl’s own home.

Sperl has been using burger memorabilia to decorate his house: he has a hamburger phone, a cheeseburger lamp and even a custom-made hamburger bed with little hamburger pillows. He also has custom carpets with hamburger designs, hamburger-shaped music boxes, erasers, clocks, trays and lots of magnets. Sperl’s passion began when he purchased some hamburger items from a toy store. From that moment on, not only did he start collecting items for the Burgerbilia from flea markets and garage sales, but he also designed his pride and joy – the Hamburger Harley, a unique hamburger-shaped tricycle, with onion wheels and pickle handles. He originally thought of using a Volkswagen Beetle, but he decided he didn’t like the sound of the air cooled flat 4 engines. Sperl then considered a hamburger dragster or a cheap go-cart, but in the end his love for Harley Davidson got the best of him.

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If love was measured in dresses, Paul Brockman would probably be the most loving husband in the world. Over the past 56 years, the German-born contractor from Lomita, California, has gifted his wife Margot with 55,000 dresses, all of which he picked out himself.

The first 10 dresses in Paul Brockman’s impressive collection were free. He got them while working at a seaport in Bremen, Germany, where workers could pick out anything they wanted when the merchandise bales were opened. He gave them all to his then-girlfriend, Margot. After going steady for a while, Paul asked the girl’s parents for her hand in marriage, and they agreed, on one condition – that they leave struggling Germany and move to America. They left for the Land of Opportunity during the 50’s and Paul was disowned by his own family for going against their wishes. The two arrived in Ohio and moved to Arizona before finally settling in California. Brockman started working in construction. No stranger to hard labor, he was soon able to build a construction company and pretty soon the money started coming in. He and Margot shared a passion for dance and went ballroom dancing every week, but Paul wanted her to have a different dress every time, so he kept buying her new ones. By the time they arrived in Los Angeles, in 1988, Margot Brockman already had between 25,000 and 26,000 dresses.

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48-year-old Deb Hoffman is probably the world’s biggest Winnie the Pooh fan. Her collection of over 8,900 Winnie-themed items has won her a place in the Guinness Book of Records and even though it takes up four rooms of her house, this dedicated fan doesn’t plan to stop adding to her collection anytime soon.

Deb, a computer software designer, from Waukesha, Wisconsin, says her obsession with the lovable Winnie started when she was just 2 years old. Her father came home late one night, and as always, she used the old “I have to go to the bathroom” excuse just so she could go see him. Only this time he had brought something home with him in a box. Her mother put it in the bathroom where she could reach it, and the moment she put her hand inside and pulled out an adorable orange bear dressed in a bright red t-shirt with the letters P-O-O-H on the front, little Deb fell in love with it. Over the years, the cuddly teddy bear remained her favorite toy, and by age 20 she had around 40-50 Winnie-themed items. Not exactly unusual, considering other kids collect hundreds of their favorite dolls or action figures. But at 22, Deb Hoffman married Gary, a careful and patient husband, and got a full-time job which provided her with some disposable income. That’s when her obsession with Winnie the Pooh really kicked into high gear.

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Hello Kitty has millions of fans around the world, but none are more in love with Sanrio’s iconic character than Asako Kanda. The 39-year-old receptionist from Japan has amassed a fantastic collection of over 4,500 Hello Kitty items.

Like many other girls of her generation, Asako’s fascination with Hello Kitty began during her elementary school days. At first, she just bought little things like pencils and erasers featuring the popular kitty, but by the time she turned 11 she was so obsessed with Sanrio’s creation that she made a Hello Kitty mug in her pottery class, and an embroided Hello Kitty apron for her home economics course. But she can’t be the only girl in the world who did this kind of stuff while growing up. But that’s the thing, while most other girls move on to idolizing boy bands or movie actors, Asako Kanda remained faithful to her childhood friend. “Kitty has always been with me, almost subconsciously,” she said in an interview a few years back. Some people call her infantile, other laugh at her bad taste, but none of this has ever affected her long-term love affair with Hello Kitty. She now holds the Guinness World Record for most Hello Kitty items, 4,519, as of August 2011.

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Marylin Mansfield, a plus-size model from Staten Island, has turned her home into a creepy nursery filled with over 300 dolls, including reborn babies, Barbies and Goth-like Krypt Kiddies.

We’ve posted our share of wacky doll collectors here on Oddity Central, like this lady with a thing for antique dolls, this other one who loves clowns, or the couple who share their home with love dolls, but Marylin actually treats her plastic collectibles like real babies. “I take them anywhere you would bring a real baby. I don’t do it for the shock value. I do it for myself because it makes me happy. I just loved when my kids were babies — and these babies stay babies forever. I buy them clothes. They never grow out of them and they never get dirty”, the tattooed platinum blonde says about her peculiar hobby.

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Zack Hample, from New York, is a baseball fan and bawl hawk – he’s great at catching and stealing balls. But Zack isn’t an ordinary ball hawk, because no one else boasts a collection as impressive as his: more than 5,800 balls, both home runs and fouled balls. The way he goes after balls at matches can be characterized as almost professional.

A typical game for Zack Hample goes kind of like this – running around the Major League ballpark, searching for foul balls or home runs, and sometimes even convincing coaches and players to toss balls into the stands. As you can imagine, being a ball hawk is no walk in the park. It involves a lot of athleticism, a bit of science and loads of luck too. All three of which Hample has plenty of. His collection of baseballs is the largest in the world. “Yes, I’m obsessed,” he admits.

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It all started when Lawrence Cobbold was 9 years old, after he purchased a picture of a bird . Today, at age 38, his home is so filled to the brim with bird ornaments. His place is so full of bird memorabilia that he has to wash up, do his laundry and have his meals at his parents’ house. In the past 25 years or so, Lawrence has managed to collect over 20,000 ornaments related to birds. His treasures could all be worth about £40,000 ($63,000) according to his own estimation.

Lawrence’s amazing bird collection consists of 15,000 ornaments, 4,800 thimbles, 1,000 fridge magnets and 300 plates. Apart from these, he has about 300 pictures, 150 mugs and 100 jigsaw puzzles that are in some way, related to birds. Each and every room in his house, every cupboard, loft and shelf is completely covered with bird-related items. Each room, in fact, has a theme of its own. The three-bedroom property belongs to his father Tony. Lawrence moved there after his previous residence, a two-bedroom house, was no longer sufficient for his ever-growing collection. Four hours of Lawrence’s day are spent rearranging and cleaning his collection– two hours before work and two hours after. When he’s not busy with his collectibles, he works full time as a warehouse attendant at the Co-op Retail Distribution Center in Plympton, England. He usually buys the ornaments at Plympton, Plymstock, Mutley Plain and Elburton, where he is constantly on the prowl for new items to add to the collection.

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