Somewhere around the summer of 1995, Ken Polsson decided the Web needed a detailed catalog of A&W Root Beer mugs.
He was correct.
Polsson says he had been collecting A&W mugs since around 1980. When he first put the site online as Ken P’s A&W Root Beer Mugs, the collection was about 30 mugs, with images of roughly a dozen.
Then the Internet did what the Internet used to do best: other weirdly interested people found him.
Comments and collector information came in. The page expanded beyond one man’s shelf into a broader reference for A&W memorabilia, corporate history, known mug varieties and collector resources.
When a hobby becomes a database
The most impressive part is the classification system.
Polsson did not merely upload photos and call it done. Mug varieties are grouped by logo style, capacity, physical characteristics and country. Individual examples receive codes such as L01fC16b, allowing tiny distinctions in logo treatment, size, fluting and base shape to be recorded without writing an essay every time.
In 2006 he rebuilt the numbering system after roughly fifteen years of using earlier codes. That is database maintenance disguised as collecting.
The update log is a historical artifact by itself.
It records newly discovered mug variations, corrected classifications, logo differences, convention mugs, collector editions, auction prices, company history work and photography updates. A January 2006 entry even notes that Polsson re-photographed mugs without root beer in them because the brown liquid interfered visually with brown logos.
That is absurdly specific.
It is also exactly why specialist sites matter.
The collection’s introduction describes how prices changed from swap-meet finds costing pocket change to harder-to-find examples costing substantially more in antique shops. It documents how the hobby expanded into coffee mugs and Great A&W Root Bear memorabilia. It also records the site’s transition into selling duplicates to help fund further collecting.
By 2024, the site was still being updated.
This is what happens when one person maintains a niche database for nearly thirty years: details accumulate that no corporation would ever commission because no executive could explain the market size without being laughed out of a meeting.
And yet those details become useful precisely because nobody else bothered.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists for this species of website—the collector who accidentally becomes the archivist because he kept showing up longer than everyone else.
Mug Shots started with about 30 mugs.
Three decades later, it is part price guide, part taxonomy, part corporate-history scrapbook and part proof that one obsessed person can build a reference work by simply refusing to stop cataloging things.