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Ever Have To Sell Your Collection..........


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I sold a complete 1975-1983 X-Men run to cover rent in 1990. I still occasionally miss the copy of 94 that I had signed by Claremont and Cockrum when I was 12. But I didn't die.

I'm thinking about moving out a boatload of CDs to cover what my wife's short term disability (no maternity leave, alas) doesn't pony up. Mortgage, groceries. Diapers!

Edit: Oh yeah, and the goddamn speeding ticket...

Edited by sjarrell
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Had to sell my LP collection in '80. A lot of great stuff. 90% probably has come out on CD and I've been able to pick it up over the last 20 years if I really want it, but there was nice stuff I'll never see again. But you do what you have to do when you have to do it, and it's OK, and I respect those who make the tough decision when they have to. What percentage of the world has ever been able to have something like our music collections, even if we just have them for a season? We've been blessed in that sense.

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When I had received a few hundred VDs and it became clear that LPs were going the way of 78s, I took aside about three hundred LPs and sold the remaining 18,000 to my friend, Karl Knudsen (Storyville). They are now in storage in Copenhagen, along with even more (i.e. his old collection) awaiting unknown disposition.

BTW, ABC News did a segment on vinyl this evening—sales are picking up, manufacture almost doubled since last year. One artist said she loved it, because her portrait on the cover was bigger. :)

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I sold my second comic book collection when I moved to Texas from Ohio in 1980. Was able to buy a new Honda motorcycle. (My first collection was stored in Philadelphia when we were in Africa and contained almost every issue of the Marvel "universe" from 1962 to 1966. The warehouse it was stored in burned down before we returned to America.)

Since then I've sold partws of my cd holdings but never "my collection." Knocking on wood. Currently debt free, including mortgage free.

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Sold my entire collection of French Indochina banknotes in Thailand before I moved back to the States. Sold most of my buddha collection there as well. I do have one Buddha in the Toledo museum of art. Sold my entire complete collection of uncirculated banknotes of South Vietnam and put some of the money into ceramics. Sold a lot of rare art. Had my share of money woes.

I never regret selling any of my collections. When they are gone; they are gone.

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Sold most of my buddha collection there as well.

Buddha collection ? There's some kind of irony in that....

I know it's just "stuff", but it's hard to let it go.

This'll help with the letting go :

EDIT : Gee Paul , where'd your post go ? I've got it if you want it :P

Edited by Chas
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I sold a lot of stuff in the sixties, when I was in and out of work like a yoyo, and early seventies, when, despite having a steady job, demands of new family outstripped my income (my wife hasn't worked since leaving to have our daughter). But I only had a small collection in those days anyway, and never sold everything. Since the mid-seventies, I haven't been pushed by finances to sell anything, though it was tough at times in those days. The few I have got rid of were because I really didn't want them.

It's a depressing thing to do, because you know you don't get their true value (to you) when you sell them. But needs must.

MG

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Sold most of my buddha collection there as well.

Buddha collection ? There's some kind of irony in that....

It sucks to have to explain irony, but you'll have to in this case. I don't understand your comment.

The irony arises from the fact that the Buddah stressed the need to eliminate desire , and a collection is nothing if not a manifestation of an extended period of single-minded desire .

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I sold a complete 1975-1983 X-Men run to cover rent in 1990. I still occasionally miss the copy of 94 that I had signed by Claremont and Cockrum when I was 12. But I didn't die.

I'm thinking about moving out a boatload of CDs to cover what my wife's short term disability (no maternity leave, alas) doesn't pony up. Mortgage, groceries. Diapers!

Edit: Oh yeah, and the goddamn speeding ticket...

When I was 18 and gearing up for the Senior Prom, I contemplated selling my comic book collection in order to get money for tuxedo rental, limo, flowers, etc. I even had a guy from a local comic book shop come over and look over my collection. For some reason, I wanted to sell the whole thing at one go, so I was unwilling to break it up and sell off parts of it. The guy offered me $200 just for my X-Men (and X-Men related) titles, but I refused (he was unimpressed by my complete runs of John Byrne on "The Fantastic Four" and "Alpha Flight") unless he took everything at once.

After I graduated high school, I lugged my collection around for the next several years. Tiring of that, I decided once again to sell my collection sometime around 1996 or so. This is shortly after the speculator comic book market crashed, devaluing everything. The guy offered me $40 for my whole collection, including those "X-Men" comics that were fetching $200 just a few years earlier (I had the "Death of Phoenix" and everything). I made a $45 counter offer, and he accepted.

In the years that have passed since that time, I have accumulated a collection that takes up only two long-boxes (which includes a few items from my old collection that somehow didn't get sold at the time. Not sure why. They must not have been with the other comics). Nothing terribly valuable, although I understand that my 1991 copy of "From Hell" #1 is worth a little bit of money. I feel bad, though, that I sold my original run of "Watchmen," because those have become quite valuable. Not that I care about the monitary value of my comics. I keep them bagged so I can enjoy reading them over and over again, not so I can sell them and send my daughter to college (they'll never be THAT valuable).

My biggest mistake as a comic book collector was letting two copies of "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" #1 slip away back when the comic was new. At the time, I didn't have a car and the comic book store was near my dad's office, so he would stop by on Friday afternoons on his way home and pick up my comics for me (this was pretty much en leu of an allowance). One week he came home with two copies of "DK" #1 instead of my usual order (which was all Marvel comics). I bitched and moaned and made him take them back so I could get my copy of "X-Factor" or "West Coast Avengers" or whatever crap I was reading. He has never let me forget that. I wound up getting "Dark Knight" when it came out in the Trade Paperback ediition (which I still have to this day).

It's actually amazing the good condition my comics are in, considering that some of them are over twenty years old now. My dad kept HIS comics in a paper grocery bag in the attic of our house. I used to read them all the time (that's how I got hooked on comics and also how I developed my adolescent devotion to Marvel). When I was a kid, most of my dad's comics couldn't have been more than five or six years old (including several Kirby FFs, Thors, and Captain Americas), but they already looked like hell (and look much, much worse now, even though I've kept them in plastic since about 1984. Of course, I wouldn't sell my dad's collection along with mine back in '96). I was reading some eleven year old comics last night, and they still look like the day I bought them...

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Sold most of my buddha collection there as well.

Buddha collection ? There's some kind of irony in that....

It sucks to have to explain irony, but you'll have to in this case. I don't understand your comment.

The irony arises from the fact that the Buddah stressed the need to eliminate desire , and a collection is nothing if not a manifestation of an extended period of single-minded desire .

I saw the artistic value, and not the religious implications.

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My first collection was stored in Philadelphia when we were in Africa and contained almost every issue of the Marvel "universe" from 1962 to 1966. The warehouse it was stored in burned down before we returned to America.

Ouch. Warehouses should be fireproof. Atlantic masters, Impulse masters, Decca masters, your funnybooks...

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