April 15th, 2004

Collections

May I keep this beercoaster?

Many people collect stamps or coffee-cream lids. Bettina Costa has developed this passion too. She already owns, however, thousands of beercoasters, an almost professional collection.

Text: Martin Staub

Those who enter www.coaster.ch will be pretty astonished. Nice and neat ordered by country, 6,303 different beercoasters are to be seen up to now. Almost every day, they will be more. The Argentine, who arrived in Laufen three years ago to live with her partner, Toni Scherrer, wanted to imitate the Swiss fond of collecting things: at the end of a sport meeting, where particularly nice beercoasters lay on the tables, she had the idea to start collecting them. And as the Laufnerin per option and her husband are travelling often all around the world, a considerable amount of material had already been gathered. “Where we are, we visit restaurants and bars, we enjoy the atmosphere and look for new beercoasters which we still don't have in our collection”, says Toni Scherrer, who supports completely his wife's hobby. Two years ago, they began together, almost without previous knowledge, to build their website. Each beercoaster is scanned from both sides and placed in the systematically organized homepage. A time-consuming task. “Thanks to this site, we have already made exchanges with a lot of collectors, and thus, our collection grows continually”, explains Costa. The post from Laufen get to deliver from one to two sendings at the door of their house in the old town.

So, the computer specialist by profession and the laboratory technician, who both work part-time, have no time to get bored with their hobby. To classify, to scan, to enter the beercoasters in the database, to make the exchanges... Bettina Costa and Toni Scherrer are happy with their collection. Flags from 129 different countries are to be seen at present in the website. Just by clicking, for example, Uzbekistan, Alaska or Zimbabwe, they soon appear the rare specimens, obverse and reverse. “We have still work for some time”, says Scherrer satisfied, “since at least 2,000 beercoasters are waiting, at the moment in the cupboard, to be published in www.coaster.ch, already one of the completest websites of this kind in the whole world”. It is not their target to collect quantity but quality, adds Costa, who besides, paints with passion and is very creative as the meticulous finish from her self-made dollhouse shows.