“We kept finding ashtrays and playing cards and chips,” said Mrs. Schultz of Henderson, Nev., “and we’d come back the next day and it seemed like it would multiply in the evening. I’ve since been told my dad had the fourth-largest slot token collection in the world.”

And so it is that Mrs. Schultz and her husband, Paul, spent three days last week at the annual Casino Chip and Gaming Tokens Collectors Club convention at the Riviera Hotel and Casino on the Strip. They sat at a pair of tables crowded with dozens of fat three-ring binders stuffed with chips and coins, all carefully annotated and priced. With a portrait of her prim-looking parents, Bettye and Vince Mowery, keeping sentry behind them, the Schultzes worked to reduce the spoils of the Mowerys’ 20-year passion for gathering — some might call it hoarding — untold thousands of items.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to get rid of all of it in our lifetime,” Mrs. Schultz said. Yet her main regret, she said, is not the sales job she inherited but “that I didn’t have more conversations with Daddy about the history of these pieces.” She added, “They’re all so fascinating.”

Many of the 2,000 vendors and enthusiasts who come here each year for the convention think of themselves as both collectors and guardians of the history of gambling around the world.

“The chip collector has a love of history because the chips come from institutions that may or may not any longer be in existence,” said Christine Smith of Glencoe, Ill., who wore a gold diamond-encrusted pendant in the figure of a royal flush and a pair of blackjack card earrings. Ms. Smith carried a bag with the image of a slot machine on its side and oversize dice for handles.

“I think they’re artwork,” Mrs. Smith said. “Many of them are just absolutely beautiful.”

Each item — be it chip, swizzle stick or imprinted shoehorn — represents a time, a place and a culture, from obscure illegal Prohibition-era gambling halls to the casinos run by organized crime figures to joints frequented by the Rat Pack to contemporary casinos on Indian reservations.

Many chip collectors start out as coin collectors but grow disillusioned at how the value of coins, particularly those minted mainly for collectors, can be manipulated.

Sometimes, though, the value of the objects of their new passion can be just as staggering. Last year, Eric Rosenblum, a lawyer from Merrick, N.Y., sold a $100 chip he picked up in the 1980s at the now defunct Desert Inn casino here for $20,000. Returning home from a vacation some 45 years ago, a Missouri woman, Sandy Marbs, threw a $1 chip from the Showboat Casino, once a Las Vegas mainstay, into her jewelry box. Last month, she sold it on eBay for nearly $29,000.

Still, most items at the show go for more modest prices. A chip from Al Capone’s Moonlight Club in Chicago is priced at $20, a keychain from the Edgewater Hotel-Casino in Laughlin, Nev., costs $1.50, an unwrapped bar of soap from the Flamingo in Las Vegas is priced at $12.50, and the asking price for a 1955 Life magazine with a cover story warning that Las Vegas’s boom times were probably over is $25.

Show attendees tend to be retirees, mostly men, which concerned Bob Ensley, 68, of Westminster, Colo., who hauled $45,000 worth of his collection to the event.

“You don’t see an awful lot of young collectors coming through, which is a shame,” Mr. Ensley said, adding, “They could make themselves a nice retirement nest egg just by collecting these things.”

There are social costs, though. Ms. Smith admits that she and her husband, Sheldon, are known back in Glencoe as “those crazy chip people,” their home overrun by memorabilia. The first thing visitors see when they enter, she said, are antique gambling wheels and a pair of four-foot-wide chips featuring images of Playboy bunnies that once hung at the Palms in Las Vegas around the time the resort opened its Playboy Club.