The other problem with any kind of price guide book in any field of
collecting is that people don't use it properly. When they are putting
price tags on things, they only pay attention to the top-dollar figure
for "mint condition" and put that on the tag, sometimes with a mark-up
over that if they are using a guide that is 5 or 10 years old, figuring
that "prices must have gone up since then". I run into this all the time
with used book sellers. When I ask them what the ridiculous price is all
about, they inevitably pull out a guide book to show me the price is
correct and I always have to explain to them that the particular copy
they are trying to sell me is nowhere close to "mint" (and far often is
in only good or borderline poor condition). Naturally, they then try to
convince me that their book really is in very good or near-mint
condition "for its age".
-- JR
Richard Halegua Comic Art wrote:
I'll bet the people with those prices fall in a few categories Bruce
1) the flea market/shopping mall sellers
those guys who set up in those places are selling to people who are
just walking by and know nothing about what they're buying.
those shopping mall sellers who setup up for one week in this mall and
then move to another state for a week etc are the worst. the prices
are astronomical on everything
2) those people who think everything is worth a million bucks.
3) people who used Jon Warren's "price guides" (sorry Jon)
Jon is one of my dearest friends - so I'm not trying to dig into him,
but those movie poster price guides are fairly useless. He wanted to
create "comic collecting" mentality in posters, so even things like
Jerry Lewis posters are always $100-200.
In comic books, everything goes up every year, or at least 98% of the
books listed do. so you have people who know nothing, get Jon's book
and now know not much more than they did already and when they have a
poster they think is way cooler - they use Jon's guide and price it 3x
that creating a true fantasy island.
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