Hey, Bob --
If you must dissent, dissent.
But please do not "try to dissent." That is tedious!
K.
On Jan 15, 2009, at 2:15 AM, Robert D. Brooks wrote:
As always, I'll try and give a (somewhat) dissenting opinion...
eBay didn't just die when they stopped caring about the small
auctions and started courting wholesalers instead... That was only
part of it, and the fact that it just so happened to coincide with
the following made it seem like that was the only explanation. But,
it was only part of it. Let me explain...
One of my biggest complaints about the poster collecting hobby is
that there is no wholesaler. There's no one who has everything.
There's no one who even has a good portion of everything in one
genre... There's no easy-access to specific titles. Posters are
way too rare. And, the most sought-after posters are fought over by
the collectors tooth and nail. If the hobby had even one major
retailer, it would eat up the entire hobby. Whenever a nice
collection comes on the market, it's gone in a month (well, all the
most collectible posters anyways). If it's an especially great
collection, it might last a year or two. The phenomenal warehouse-
finds might last a decade, but those have been few and far between
(and all seem to be long past their best-before date today). A true
wholesaler would need a new warehouse-find of material every few
years. And, those just don't exist... A decade ago or more, I used
to subscribe to MCW, and eagerly anticipated receiving each issue as
it was about the only place to find posters for sale. There was
only one problem: I lived in Canada - so the magazine would come a
few days later than in the States. So, at least 95% of the time I
tried to buy an advertised poster, it was already sold a few days
before! Virtually every freakin' time! It was so ridiculous that I
didn't renew my subscription past the first couple years, just to
save me the grief.
If you've purchased posters on the internet for the last 10 years,
you'll have noticed what I call 'poster disease.' A new web site
opens up with a great collection of posters. So you watch it as the
site gets worse and worse, year by year, as all the good posters are
sold off, and never replaced, leaving nothing but the chaff.
There's no new source of original posters, so the web sites/
galleries/poster-stores have nowhere to replenish their material.
So, they just wither away and die eventually. The good posters are
too rare. Think of all the best web sites and stores to buy posters
5 or 6 years ago - are any of them more than a ghost of their former-
selves? Not many. I went to LA a year ago, and took a morning off
to go poster buying. So, there I was, ready to spend a fortune at
the few decent (and few not so decent) poster shops in the area.
Virtually all of them were dead or dying. I didn't get to spend a
dollar.
Just to give you an idea of how rare original posters are, here's a
little anecdote (remember, I only collect modern posters [last 40 or
50 years], so nothing I'm looking for should be that hard to
find)... About 10 years ago, I made a list of the posters I most
wanted on a sheet of paper. I filled the sheet of paper, both
sides, in three columns, hand-written. So, approximately one or two
hundred of the rarest one sheet posters I hoped to one day acquire.
You know, the one's where price doesn't really matter. The rarest
of the rare. Your most sought-after pieces. The ones you just have
to have (within your price range, naturally). I made the list in
the days before you could search for long strings on eBay, so I
could just pull out the list and search for everything one by one
each week. Every year I would add a couple titles and cross off
whichever ones I managed to purchase. I just moved recently, and
came upon the list, having not looked at it in years. I was
actually kind of giddy, as I figured: hey, it's been years, I'll
probably get to cross off a ton of posters from my list, I must have
found tons of them recently. Years worth, getting crossed off all
at once. When I was done, I looked over the sheet and was saddened
to notice that in the decade or more since I first wrote the list,
I'd probably only crossed off about a dozen posters - total. And,
it wasn't like I was outbid on most of them - in all that time, most
of them just never came up for sale (or they only showed up at major
auctions and went for ridiculous prices)! Like 98% of my most
desired posters just don't exist in the marketplace (for all intents
and purposes). And, if it's that hard for me to find more recent
posters, I shudder to think how frustrating it must be to collect
silent posters - or 6-sheets - or 40 by 60's - or Universal Horror -
or 50's exploitation... Again, there's no wholesaler - there's not
even the little specialty shop that has everything. Posters are too
rare to allow those kind of places to exist. And all the sellers
are running out! Heck, they've pretty much run out already...
The same thing just happened with eBay. A decade ago, eBay was new
- and revolutionary - in the poster hobby. There was finally an
easy way to sell posters. No more trade magazines, buying sight-
unseen. Now you had images, and better yet, cheap auctions.
Anybody could sell to anybody. Buyers weren't constrained any
more. Collectors flocked, and all their material went online at
once. As that original mass of posters was sold off, prices started
off low and continued to rise and rise and rise. Then, a few years
ago, it all seemed to stop. The new material stopped coming. eBay
ran dry (their policy of ass-raping their best customers didn't help
much, but hey, we're all sheeple, so thank you, may I please have
another). Now, eBay sucks, because every week it's the same posters
being sold. Nothing changes. Ever. Nothing new shows up. Just
the same old crap. The left-overs. The chaff. eBay caught the
poster disease, and she's on her last breaths... The infection just
so happened to coincide with their stupid policy changes, so no one
really noticed.
So, yes, eBay dug their own grave, just like the music business, but
the poster hobby was especially hard hit due to other reasons as
well (shall we call it The Great Poster Drought of the Early 21st
Century?)...
Cheers,
The other Poster Bob...
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