The Dope on Price Guides

For every conceivable collection, someone has written a "definitive" price guide. Glassware, toys, CDs and DVDs, tools, you name it, a price guide exists.

Many price guides exist online, particularly for collectibles with a seeming infinite variety of items. Baseball cards are a good example, with thousands and thousands of new issues being released every year. No print volume could possible catalog every card released in a single year, let alone and in 100+ years of the hobby. Online price guides can provide the most comprehensive array of pieces for a given hobby, but they can be hard to search unless you are looking for only a couple specific prices. Pricing a collection can take an enormous amount of time.

Other price guides are printed in hard copy available through retail outlets or mail order. Some, such as Overstreet's Comic Book Price Guide, have long histories of reliable reporting on a hobby. Print price guides have the benefit of being more easily scanned and more useful for the beginner trying to learn more about their hobby.

Most price guides are built from the reports of retailers over the past year or more of the prices they obtained from their sales to collectors. Price guides reflect the real world supply of and demand for a product. Whether through auction houses, online bidding sites, or retail stores, guide authors collect sales information to create a database that informs the collector.

Price guides can be invaluable sources of information. However, price guides are almost always a poor tool for estimating the value of your own collection. Here is the straight dope on price guides.

1. Timeliness - Price guides are always somewhat out of date. In more volatile hobbies, this can mean that the reported prices do not actually reflect current supply and demand for a product.

2. Relative vs. Absolute - Few prices guides can provide you with absolute retail values for your collectibles that are both current and relevant for your area. Many price guides, however, can provide excellent ideas of the relative value of specific items. If, for instance, you have one vinyl record that lists for $40 and another than lists for $10, then you can be reasonably sure that the former is worth at least four times the latter.

3. Least Common Denominator - One serious flaw of nearly every price guide is the notion that every item available for hobbyists has value. Even the best price guides have minimum values for literally every piece covered. Unfortunately, this can give you a terrible overestimate of the value of your collection. For example, there are baseball cards, records, and comic books that have absolutely no resale value whatsoever. Perhaps they were overproduced, have small if any demand, or are simply poor products. Regardless, take note of the lowest prices reported in a guide and you can often guess that those comics listed at $3 are actually unsellable.

4. Variant Mania - Then there are some price guides that simply tell you too much. Discogs is a fabulous online resource for music records, CDs, cassettes, etc. Many listings, however, have hundreds of variations differentiated by what are differences that the average collector could not care less about. Your safest bet is to assume you do not have the ultra rare, one-of-a-kind item because it is, well, ultra-rare.

Selling Stamps

I have collected stamps off and on since 1963, when I bought my first penny stamps from a tiny store in my hometown of Barberton Ohio. Over the years, I accumulated thousands of stamps and covers, created collections for family members, and narrowed my focus down to a few topics and eras.

Sadly, young people have not replaced us old-timers in the hobby. As a result, many collections show up in estate sales because families are not interested in keeping them. While stamp dealers will buy albums, they are generally only interested in rarities and not whole collections.

Even if the family doesn't want to keep their loved one's collection, they know how much sentimental value it holds and hate to give it away. An estate sale can be the answer.

An estate sale company with knowledge of philately can appraise your collection and give you an idea of what you might expect to get from selling it. When I prepare a collection for a sale, I pull out the noteworthy items for special attention and pricing. I group together other items into logical lots. I estimate the value of general collections in albums and the whole album accordingly. While there are fewer stamp collectors today than ever in the past century, there are still folks buying certain types of stamps and even whole collections just for the fun of sorting through the stamps for hours on end.

Grading the Media Markets

Few collectible markets have changed more in the past century than music media. With each change in technology, the demand for older music media rises and falls in different ways. What follows is my current grading of the state of the collector markets for the many forms of music media working chronologically from oldest to newest.

Pre-50's (D) - Before the 1950's, music was available on wax cylinders and records compatible with RCA Victor, Edison, and other phonographs. With rare exception, the market for these is currently poor. For every rare jazz/blues record, there are 100's of undesirable symphony, opera, popular vocal, and swing era records. The vast majority one finds are also in poor playing condition, making this a weak music media market now and for the foreseeable future.

Vinyl (A+) - With the discovery of vinyl by new generations of listeners, the market for 33 1/3 and 45 RPM records is better than ever. While many genres remain plentiful and undesirable, others are super hot, including rock, jazz, blues, metal, indie, and early country among others.

Tapes (C-) - Cassette, 8-track and reel-to-reel tapes have small collector markets and the right tape can be worth a lot. However, the supply far exceeds current and probable future demand. Cassettes generate the least interest followed by 8-tracks. Reel-to-reel tapes can be pricey, mostly because these collectors tend to take better care of their media than others.

Compact discs (B-) - The market for CD's is declining rapidly, even though there are still lots of collectors buying them. The advent of streaming services will eventually kill much of this demand, rendering CD's as outmoded and undesirable as cassette tapes.

New Vinyl (B+) - Many records available in stores today in mass market outlets like Walmart and Target are made of a higher quality vinyl than in the 60's, 70's and 80's. They often are made of colored vinyl in limited print runs, but they also carry hefty retail price tags. The future will tell whether these new releases will retain their value. As with any collectible, I recommend buying what you like and not using them as an investment vehicle. Also, check out your local independent record stores and avoid being sucked in by most of these mass market releases.