Obsessed with salt and pepper. Mahoning County woman amasses collection of 75,000 shakers

For many, salt and pepper shakers are common items found on the dinner table. For Karen Weaver, they fill the whole house.

Glass cabinets span the walls of her living room, filled with glass antiques primed to hold the popular seasoning and spice duo. The containers are spun to resemble animals, musicians, vehicles and even popular characters.

The 39th annual Novelty Salt & Pepper Shakers Club convention begins Thursday at the Embassy Suites by Hilton in Jackson Township, and for Weaver, this means there's work to be done. She was in the process last week of preparing her extensive collection to be displayed.

This year's convention — which is open only to club members and not the general public — will be Olympics-themed, with several games and activities planned for guests to enjoy.

Weaver, who serves as the registration chair for the club, has been collecting shakers since 1975.

"My husband actually told me to go down in the village green when they had an antiques show there and start to collect something, and I picked salt and pepper shakers," she said.

Karen Weaver has amassed a collection of more than 75,000 salt and pepper shakers

Now, she holds a collection of more than 75,000 shakers spanning numerous genres and popular franchises like Disney and Warner Bros.

"Just about anything you can think of, they made a shaker," she said.

Weaver's son Josh serves as chair for the convention and has been going to Salt & Pepper Shaker conventions with her since he was a kid. He said the closest rival to the collection he's aware of totaled around 40,000.

"I can pretty confidently say it's the largest collection in the world," he said.

Josh Weaver said the prices for shakers can vary greatly, as it depends on what someone is willing to pay at a certain time.

"You can get brand new ones at a Cracker Barrel for a couple bucks, and even some old sets from Japan in the '50s still only go for a couple dollars," he said. "But ones that are really collectible and ones that everybody is trying to get can go for hundreds of dollars."

Karen Weaver said she doesn't really have a set favorite shaker because she's more concerned with enjoying the collection and working to add to it.

"I like [certain] series, but there's just so many of them. It's hard to pick out your favorite," she said.

Weaver primarily finds her shakers online these days, so she looks forward to being able to shop around at the convention.

"We used to go on the weekends to flea markets and antiques shows," she said, "... but now, it's very hard for me to find anything that way."

Beyond the living room, the collection is showcased in various rooms across the house. Weaver said a lot of renovations have been done over the years to make space for the shakers.

"During the pandemic, my husband made me a new shaker room back here, because we weren't allowed to go anywhere," she said. "And he likes trains, so we incorporated it with his trains."

Weaver even wrote a book about shakers: 'Shakers Gone Wild'

Weaver had many anthropomorphic shakers on display, which she defined as shakers that depicted aspects of a human character. These sorts of shakers eventually became the subject of her book, "Shakers Gone Wild: Anthropomorphic Salt & Pepper Shakers," which she wrote with her friend Sylvia Tompkins.

"It took us five years. We traveled all around," she said. "We went even to other countries, and we gathered all the information and pictures and put it in a book."

Weaver said a lot of the fun of collecting shakers is putting together series, which are a subset of shakers that were made together. Among her collection, shakers grouped together in a series had similar features or themes in common. She said the process of completing a series can be time consuming.

"I've been looking for a long time and still haven't found [some]. It's just a matter of the luck," she said.

Weaver said she's met plenty of great people during her time with the club, and she is looking forward to seeing them at this year's convention.

"It's almost like a reunion of a family getting together," she said.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Karen Weaver has collection of 75,000 salt & pepper shakers