FIRST, FIND YOUR IDIOT

I'm often being informed that lots of the things that lie scattered about my little house are "worth" quite a lot. Various old magazines with pictures of particular movie or television stars on the cover will go for quite a few more quid than marked as the cover price apparently, if you know where to look and can be bothered to go looking for the keenest sort of buyer.

However, when you look into it, most of the contents of the various stacks of old magazines the are lying about the place and threatening to engulf me if they should ever collapse are already for sale on certain e-selling sites and often either fail to sell at all, or disappear at a price that is usually just a few pence.

Bloody so-called "Collector's Editions…" or "Exclusive Covers…" or things printed with several covers to tempt the gullible.

Occasionally one lucky seller will find that there is a bidding war for that old edition of something that they just happened to hang on to, but it does rather depend upon two keen and eager buyers happening to come across your offer to sell at precisely the same moment.

In other words, first, find your idiot… then hope that you'll find another idiot at about the same time.

After all, if someone is stupid or desperate enough to want that old Radio Times with "Harry Potter" on the cover that they'll pay three figures for it, who am I to stop them…? It can be quite easy for the unscrupulous dealer to manipulate the obsessions of others so that they are persuaded that some old pieces of tat are actually worth a week's salary to them.

Of course, in the real world, most things are only really "worth" what someone is prepared to pay for them…

You can walk around your house looking at stuff and thinking "Well, I paid XX for that so it must be worth at least YY" or you might be lucky enough to notice that somebody once paid hundreds for something that you also happen to have a copy of, but that doesn't mean that anyone's going to give you a similar price for one, and it might still end up going for seven pence on eBay, only to be sold on by your far more savvy purchaser for those mythical hundreds once they've got their grubby little mitts upon it…

Let the seller beware...

I may well have spent twenty quid or more on that shiny new book when I first bought it, but other copies still turn up in the remainder outlets for less than a quarter of that, or even in the charity shop for a couple of quid if only I'd been more patient, or selling on Amazon for £0.01 (plus postage) if I really want to feel fed up about it.

There, unfortunately, is the reality of it...

Once upon a time, I think that I genuinely believed that I might be creating an archive, or maybe I might need reference material for some topics I was becoming a minor league "expert" in and might be able to give talks about, if I was ever so inclined.

However, these days I'm very aware that it's far more likely that it will all end up just being thrown into a skip once I've carked it.

Still, it's much the same with anything. Houses, cars, jewellery, fine art. Things that are "precious" to you are only so much landfill to almost everyone else… unless they think that they can sniff out a bargain…

Because that's the other side of the coin, isn't it. You're out to get as much as you can for your tat, whereas everyone else is looking to get it as cheaply as they can and maybe make a tidy profit.

There's also the tiny problem that any collector has. How do you get rid of a collection what you've built up without grieving for its loss…?

There are now hundreds of editions of "Empire" Magazine stacked up in my house that I can't see anyone ever wanting, but if I sold them en masse they'd probably struggle to make me a tenner, but individual copies with certain actors on the cover might be able to be sold at many times that on their own to a "Star Trek" or "James Bond" fan, if you know where to look for one...