At the local mutiplex, the tightly edited \u201ccoming attractions\u201d are often better than the real movies they advertise.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, when today\u2019s real-world \u201ccoming attractions\u201d feature a fast-devaluating dollar, means-testing of \u201centitlements\u201d (come back and let us know when you\u2019ve sold your house and you\u2019re living under the bridge), making it a crime to \u201choard\u201d wealth or move it offshore, and a probable de facto default on federal government debt, leading to an 18 percent national sales tax to try and pay for all that great vote-buying \u201cfree stuff\u201d … retirement planning may start to feature more slam-bang action than we\u2019d really like.<\/p>\n
What lots of people have already started to do is sell their stuff. It provides ready cash to fill the gaps, plus lightens your load should you need to bug out.<\/p>\n
Question is: what\u2019s it all worth?<\/p>\n
You can look it up Online, or buy a price guide. In my experience, either course can lead to inflated expectations, frustration, and anger, especially if you skip the little section at the front of the book that says: \u201cRead this important information about \u2018condition.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always collected coins, in a small way. For a short time I ran classified ads in the Review-Journal, specifying an interest in acquiring pre-1900 European coins and historical medals, especially British, especially early Victorian: No American except Carson City mint.<\/p>\n
These \u201climiters\u201d might as well have been written in Klingon, for all the good they did. I traveled to view quite a few \u201ccollections\u201d (in fact, Mason jars or peanut cans containing assemblages of modern brass and aluminum coins collected on foreign trips, or pulled out of pocket change by grandma) that met virtually none of my criteria.<\/p>\n
This became mainly an exercise in diplomatically breaking the news that — no matter how much we loved the departed relative who gathered these conglomerations — they were in fact worthless piles of crap.<\/p>\n
Most amazing to me was the intense, unshakable faith of the young women — they always seemed to be young women — who had looked up daddy\u2019s late-19th-century U.S. Barber dime or quarter in a paperback price guide, and were convinced potential buyers were trying to cheat them out of a coin worth thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re looking in the \u2018brilliant uncirculated\u2019 column, ma\u2019am.\u201d I would say in my most sensitive, \u2018I\u2019m afraid Fido has gone to doggie heaven\u2019 voice. \u201cThis coin is \u2018good\u2019 at best. You see how lady liberty\u2019s head is reduced to a silhouette, and you can barely make out the date? Over here, in the \u2018good\u2019 column, eight dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI dunno. It looks brilliant uncirculated to me. See how it shines?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMa\u2019am, there\u2019s no such grade as \u2018shiny.\u2019 Collectors use magnifying loupes to look for tiny spots of wear on the high spots, and they prefer the original patina. The fact that you put it through the washing machine last night, or went to work with a toothbrush and some silver polish, has not enhanced its grade for a collector.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there are the records. Price guides for old vinyl LPs are useful for establishing relative values (buy the Ronettes; buy Beatles in mono; please destroy all your \u201cSing Along With Mitch\u201d albums, as they appear to be reproducing.)<\/p>\n
But most of the old auction reports on which price-guide listings are based for swing, big band — even the later, stereo Elvis — seriously overstate what these will bring today. The fan base for Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and Harry Belafonte isn\u2019t buying any more. They — or their heirs — are dumping stock back on the market. Prices plummet.<\/p>\n
Knowing all this, I don\u2019t think I qualified as a complete idiot when I bought the old box of brown-edged science fiction magazines out of a storage locker last year and found in the bottom a handful of \u201csilver age\u201d Marvel and D.C. Comics with 10-cent cover prices.<\/p>\n
Just because my four-year-old \u201cComics Values\u201d told me D.C.\u2019s \u201cJustice League of America\u201d No. 16 (circa 1962) catalogued at $400 to $600 in \u201cnear mint to mint\u201d didn\u2019t fool me into thinking I\u2019d just won a cross-country airline ticket.<\/p>\n
These comics had been read by a teen-ager and thrown in a box 40 years ago. They still had their covers attached and most had suffered no major tears, but they displayed various forms of wear and chipping, especially at the corners and near the staples. I\u2019m no expert, but I can read the generalized grade descriptions in the guidebooks, which told me that at \u201cfair to very good,\u201d these books might sell for as little as \u201c10 to 40 percent\u201d of those impressive near-mint values.<\/p>\n
I figured even that was optimistic, since collectors want stuff as near to pristine as possible. I hoped the JLA might bring 40 bucks; the Marvel Fantastic Four No. 29 (circa 1964; cataloguing at $400 in Near Mint) might be worth $50.<\/p>\n
The big mystery was Amazing Spiderman No. 3, circa 1963, which catalogues at $6,000 to $8,000 but for which the copy in hand would barely merit a grade of \u201cfair,\u201d with part of the cover missing as well as a coupon cut out from an inside page. Ninety bucks?<\/p>\n
I placed a handful of such comics in a glass case at the brunette\u2019s emporium of vintage fashion, books and vinyl in the antique mall for most of a year. She never got so much as a low-ball offer.<\/p>\n
Maybe they just weren\u2019t getting noticed by the right potential customers. I pulled them all out and decided to do an experiment, visiting several local \u201cauthentic\u201d comics stores and offering five or six books in the mid-price range — stuff I figured might be worth $40 to $90 dollars apiece — for sale.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t appreciate folks who impose on MY valuation skills, such as they may be, and then refuse to sell. So I decided in advance I\u2019d complete the experiment, selling the comics at the prices offered.<\/p>\n
My first surprise was how many local Las Vegas comics shops — including some rated quite highly on the Internet — don\u2019t buy at all, or sell only new issues and thus neither buy NOR sell pre-1969 comics.<\/p>\n
I finally found a place that did, although — predictably — they buy \u201cpre-1968 only.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course. What\u2019s your spread?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe pay 20 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next week: What Vin got for the old comics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the local mutiplex, the tightly edited \u201ccoming attractions\u201d are often better than the real movies they advertise. Unfortunately, when today\u2019s real-world \u201ccoming attractions\u201d feature a fast-devaluating dollar, means-testing of \u201centitlements\u201d (come back and let us know when you\u2019ve sold your house and you\u2019re living under the bridge), making it a crime to \u201choard\u201d wealth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,53,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-town","category-books","category-collectibles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-7Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}