When you ask Wayne Meadows about how many corkscrews he has in his collection he says he doesn t have an exact number and it doesn t matter. I tell everyone the same thing: 3,000 plus or minus 1,000, he says. If you said who has the rarest ones I probably have a lot of rare ones.
For Meadows, it s not the amount, though surely he has one of the largest collections. It s about the quality; he figures his collection is valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The trick is endless people invented endless corkscrews, he says, explaining the huge variety.
That s why he has rarity upon rarity, including the world s only steam-powered corkscrew, cork picks (which predate corkscrews) and plenty of corkscrews which are the last or one of the last of their kind. His collection of bar corkscrews is the largest in the world.