Highly recommend Fred Knudsen’s YouTube video on these two. Fascinating and tragic.

Police and workmen removed approximately 120 tons of valuables, junk and other items from the Collyer brownstone.[39] Items were removed from the house such as baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three body forms, painted portraits, photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900s, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child’s chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars,[21] eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T with which Langley had been tinkering, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and other fabrics, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright),[39] a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old, and thousands of bottles and tin cans and a great deal of garbage.[23][44] Near the spot where Homer had died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks, with a total of $3,007 (about $46,983 as of 2024).

when they do this with newspapers, we view their compulsion and mental illness with pity.

when billionaires do this with money, we treat those hoarders as heroes.

there’s nothing quite so toxic as human society.