Big Important Collecting Rule # 4

Books drive up prices. Always. You can collect widgets for 25 years and no one will care about them, but eventually someone will write a book about them. The book can be pure crap (and normally is) in which they just show photos of their collection of widgets. But the value of those widgets will then go up as “there is a book about them.”

This is actually how lunchbox collecting started. Some guy started buying them up cheap. OK, lunch boxes are cool. I miss my old ones. But no one cared about them really until he wrote a book showing photos of the lunchboxes he had picked up. Then WNGO! They became a hot collectible, he sold his collection and made a killing, and I have no idea what he is doing now. In fact I once read a “how to make money in the collectibles market” in which they suggested the best way to make money was to find a cheap item no one had discovered, buy them all up, then do a book, and sell your collection off at a high price.

Oh, did I mention these books always have a “price guide” in which the author tells you what they are worth. I wish I could set my own prices, especially if I had a dozen examples… Some more reasonable authors refuse to put down prices, but just provide a “rarity index” which is close but at least not as mercenary.

Now you may laugh but this is true. I’ve seen it happen a few times. Some silly thing you find at most flea markets or yard sales for cheap suddenly zooms up and you can’t find them anymore. In all probability a book had been done on them.

Last month I started looking for a (not rare) early version of the M1910 Army canteen with a flat top. I asked a dealer I know who normally has a few of them if he had any and the cost. He told me that he had none, and that last year he would have said maybe $40, but all of a sudden they were going for $150-200 on ebay. And then he said “someone must have written a book.” And in fact someone had. In fact it wasn’t even a very good book. Just photos and rough information on various models. No digging into the archives for reasons why changes were made, or specification drawings or anything. Just a bare bones book that happens to point out that a certain version exsists. Suddenly everyone must own it!

So if you really love a collectible, pray very hard that no one does a book about them. Or make sure that you beat them to it.