The Precious, Part 2

Today, some further reflections on picking. But first, I want to start today with heartfelt kudos to the collecting community in the wake of the Los Angeles fires. Thankfully, my home is in the middle of town and has escaped damage, but I have collector friends and family evacuated, confirmed to be burned out, and a few collector acquaintances no one has heard from as of this writing but who lived squarely in the Alta Dena fire zone. The fires have deeply impacted Los Angeles collectors. What I have heard is an outpouring of concern from collectors as far away as Massachusetts. In the first few days, when things were a bit chaotic and unclear, and people not from LA did not understand the vast distances between parts of the city, I received emails and texts from close friends and casual acquaintances alike asking if I was affected, many with offers of assistance, some even offering a place to stay should we need to evacuate. We here in LA feel the love and we are thankful for it, for real. Now on to business, which in this case means more brain droppings about picking.

An exception to the rule of the early picker bird getting the worm is estate sales. To be sure, getting to any sale as early as possible is the optimal strategy but visiting an estate sale the last day is sometimes a winner. I’ve worked with estate liquidators in my law practice. Some are better than others with specific items, but generally, they are not good at everything, and their standard practice appears to be to grotesquely overprice anything they don’t know until the final day, when they take reasonable offers. I went to one estate sale at the start of day 1 and found two troves of vintage postcards and ephemera. The liquidator wanted five bucks an item, or $5,000 to buy it out. It made no sense, so I asked him where he got that figure. eBay, of course, but his research minion focused on the ask for single items and not the actual selling prices of lots. I walked away. On the last day I went back and picked up both the “$5,000” box and an even larger bundle of photos and ephemera for $600.

Speaking of processing picks, I am religious about opening every packet, leafing through every magazine and book, even going through the packing materials in any box I pick up. It is amazing what falls out. The most legendary tale of doing just that is that of a picker in New England who bought an old, framed picture at a barn sale, pulled apart the frame, and found that an original printing of the Declaration of Independence had been used to pad the frame. That padding sold for a fortune. I haven’t hit one of those yet, but I’ve had a few good ones. Just recently I leafed through a 1950s comic I bought and found a 1906 hunting license from Idaho. How those two items got together and ended up in Cali in 2024…it’s a puzzle shrouded in mystery wrapped in an enigma. What is not mysterious is that the hunting license was worth a multiple of what I paid for the comic, and I didn’t even know it was there when I bought the comic. Moral of the story: I take the time to make sure there isn’t anything inside an item before I sell it. Remember, one of the examples of the T206 Cobb with the Cobb back was tucked in a book.

Second moral of the story is to do your research. I had no idea that people actually collect old hunting licenses, but they do. The buyer told me that any license from a Western state that is over 100 years old is desirable and valuable. I did not know that.

My biggest weakness as a picker is that I love to gamble on cheap, large lots of modern cards. They work out only occasionally, but I keep placing my bets. The theory isn’t a bad one: hit a major card in a junk pile and it pays for a dozen or more future efforts. Same logic is funding a number of start-ups. These three deals are typical for good, bad and meh deals. One flea market, I purchased a lot of about 5,000 cards for $20 on the gamble that several boxes of junk wax cards would hold a good rookie or two. Nope. 99% of the card went right into the recycling bin and the stars I did find are not likely to cover the cost if they sell at all; no one wants junk wax Bert Blyleven cards, not even his mother. Bad deal. I’ve recycled or given Goodwill hundreds of thousands of cards over the years, all the product of bad bets. On the other hand, one $20 box of dreck I bought had mixed years of cards in it, mostly junk wax, but sprinkled with 1970s cards. I found exactly one good card, but it was the right good card, a 1976 Topps Walter Payton rookie. I’d make that deal every day. Another pick looked really, really bad for me—I paid three figures for a massive lot of 1980s football sets and cards only to find that all the big rookies and stars were missing—until I checked a box marked “extras” and found most of them. Whoever cleaned out the albums put the stars in the extras box and forgot it, thankfully. Went from money loser to mildly profitable in an instant. Oh, and one thing I can tell you from years of experience is that pack-fresh early 1980s cards are worth about $0.03 per card in bulk, if you can move them at all.

I accept that I can and will screw up regularly; it is part of the picking process. Standing in a parking lot at 6:00 on a cold Sunday morning with a flashlight is not a great way to suss out altered cards or hairline creases. Nor is it possible to go through a box of cards thoroughly. I purchased a big box of 1970s Topps nonsports at a flea market on a dark winter morning because I saw that blue border indicative of 1977 Topps Star Wars series 1 sprinkled throughout the box but ended up with (worthless) ET cards instead; Topps recycled the border designs. D’oh! Took an $85 hit and moved along. You also have to improvise sometimes when you can’t get enough bars to check eBay on an item you find. Like I said, it averages into the overall outcome.

I’ve also noticed that exhaustion can creep in and cloud my judgment. Just recently, I found a small trove of unopened rack packs after four hours of relentless hunting, but I stupidly left some behind because I was tired and cranky and they were ‘junk wax’; I forgot the basics, like checking my prejudices at the door. Those junk wax packs may be useless crap to me, but I later discovered that they sell for 3x the ask I turned down. I overpaid for some old comics instead, which is the flip side of the fatigue equation, making stupid deals because you are tired. My advice is to eat a hearty breakfast even if it is at 4:00 a.m., and keep drinking water at the event even if you aren’t thirsty. Both stave off fatigue far better than Starbucks.

In some ways, picking can be like playing poker: I watch for the habits, tells and ticks of my opponent, the seller. I do that by engaging with the seller and listening. I am fortunate to have learned to be gregarious. It is a trained skill, not something that comes naturally to me. People just love to talk about themselves. Some sellers are so eager to tell you their life story that they vomit it out unbidden, and it never hurts to listen because in the process they tell you about their mindset towards selling. One fellow told me that he inherited his stuff from his father, who was a professional junk dealer, and he wanted to liquidate it and get out. A few minutes later I owned a very nice run of items for way below market. As I was leaving, he asked me how he could get rid of the rest of his stuff. I told him to either grind it out at retail like he’s doing or lower his prices and allow someone like me to buy it all wholesale. He turned me down (but I’ll get you later, my pretty, you and your little dog, too…). Listening also builds a connection that I use to my benefit negotiating a deal. I picked up a small cache of rare boxing materials from a seller who told me that her late husband was the collector and left her with a giant pile of boxing stuff and she opened a business selling it all. Since I’d recently lost my parents and found that clearing out all their stuff was practically a full-time job for a year, we commiserated and clicked on that point, and I made a very good purchase. She did OK too; I paid 10% more than I wanted to: I guess I am a softie sometimes.

This next observation may seem a bit mean-spirited, but I try to tell it like it is, not like what I want it to be. No matter how many times I go picking, I am perpetually stunned by how ignorant so many sellers are about what they sell. It’s glorious. Fools and their money, soon parted by me. I once purchased a rare baseball item that a dealer who had no sports acumen had on his table; sold it immediately for a giant multiple of what I paid. Another guy had a whole stack of old cards and when I asked for a price on them, he said “five bucks”. They would have been a fair ask at five bucks a card for what he had, so five bucks for 150+ cards, that’s just ignorant. Sold. Just recently, I listened to an old time dealer bloviating about all of the massive deals he made while I was going through his boxes of ephemera and pulling cards worth 5x-60x his asking prices. Even wheedled a 50% discount out of him for the bundle. Forty bucks for $800+ retail, fool, say farewell to money. Of course, for every seller who ignorantly throws away money, there are ten monkeys who want $4 a card for 1988 Donruss commons. I especially love the ones who have no idea what they want and are too afraid to make a deal at all. I had one woman show me an entire album of postcards but she would not name a price for it, just a chorus of “I don’t know”. Then what are you doing at a show, love? If you run across one of that sort, just throw a number at the lot and walk away when they won’t negotiate. Not worth the time and annoyance.

Last, and most important, at least for me, is not to fall in love with the items I am buying to resell. Don’t get high on your supply, so to speak. I love what I do, and I find so many interesting and beautiful things that I end up collecting stuff instead of selling it. I never wanted to collect 19^th century non-sports trade cards, for example, but the artwork on them can be so incredible that I now have an album of them. And do I really need Luke Skywalker’s 1977 Topps “rookie” card? No, I’m a Trekkie, not a Star Wars fan, but I have most of a high end series 1 set because…I don’t know, it was there, it was cheap, and I could. Starting new collections is a bad way to run a business, but those new pin-up postcards I got last week look awful good. Must…Not…Give…In. Must..Sell.