Thinking About Hobbies: The “Thing” About Fine and Rare Treasures
I have been collecting stamps since I was about 6-7 years old, meaning that I currently have about 55 years' worth of experience.
Along the way, I have collected all manners of other things, as well... from glass paperweights, to coins, to books, to fountain pens and beyond...
The other day, I mentioned in passing that I had come into six large bins containing somebody's stamp collections/accumulations... or whatever you want to call it. As always, those are exciting events because you never know whether you're going to find "fine and rare treasure" somewhere in boxes that are — in essence — an estate clearance.
Of course we hear a lot about people who "find a Picasso and grandma's attic," or some great rarity in one collectible form or another... but we rarely hear about the vast majority of instances in which what we sift through turns out to be something that might be "advertised" to have great potential, but in the end it's absolutely nothing.
In this particular case, I spent a couple of days sifting through loads and loads of "stuff" and pretty much ended up with the eventual result that it was absolutely nothing, or very close to it.
"Had great potential, looked good, but wasn't much of anything."
Sometimes that feels like it could be the slogan of my entire life!
Joking aside, however, however disappointed we may be after going through a box lot of "stuff"of a collectible nature and actually not finding any "rare treasures," the truth of rare treasures is precisely that they are RARE!
And we tend to forget that. If we actually found aforesaid "rare treasures" in every box we went through, those wouldn't actually be rare treasures, would they? They'd be "common." Think about it...
That holds true whether we're talking about baseball cards, or postcards, or stamps — as were the case for me — or coin collections, or comic book collections... the rare stuff is extremely difficult to find.
In addition to that, 99% of the collectors in any given hobby pursue the hobby pretty much on a shoestring. Accordingly, the actual chances of you finding that elusive sports card or that first run comic book that you'll be able to sell on eBay for $800 are actually pretty close to ZERO.
But it happens just often enough to keep the "treasure from grandma's attic" myth alive and well... yet, as I said, we tend to forget that rare means rare.
In other — peripherally related — news, I did manage to pick up a couple of good deals on individual stamps, more or less by accident, while I was doing some research... when I discovered on a hobby sales site in Europe a couple of better items from my native Denmark that I could make a small profit on, simply by "repackaging" them with appropriate descriptions, rather than just "old stamp from Denmark."
In my world, that typically means I spend $5-$10 up front and turn around sell the items for $50-$100. It's nice when that happens but those kinds of opportunities aren't out there in sufficient quantities that I could actually make a living at it but it happens often enough to me that I can in fact remain interested in excited and what I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I now face the task chopping those six large bins of "not very much" into smaller chunks and putting those chunks out on eBay in the form of what we typically characterize as "collateral lots." And even though I didn't find any great treasure, there's still a certain challenge in being able to take something that is essentially "worthless," and turning it into enough that after expenses and shipping that it might buy a nice dinner.
From a strictly financial point of view, is it worth it? Absolutely not! The best I could hope for might be ending up paying myself something like $2.50 an hour for the effort, but on the whole I'm having some fun doing it and so it's hard to put a monetary value on that.
I'll come back in a future "hobby chat" post and share the final result!
Anyway, some of this post hearkens back to a post I wrote a little over a week ago about now collectibles hobbies tend to fall apart when people get into them for the purpose of making money. In this case, my purpose wasn't necessarily to make money, but it would have been nice to find something that would have rewarded me for my time.
Better luck next time!
Anyway, I thought I'd start writing occasional pieces about hobbies and collecting, since it's how I derive a substantial part of my living. We'll see how it goes, and whether anyone is interested.
Thanks for stopping by, and welcome to February! I hope the new month is treating you kindly! I'd like to think it at least can't be any worse than January was...
How about YOU? Do you "collect" anything? Do collecting hobbies interest you, at all? Do you know anyone, or have you heard of anyone in your "circle" who found "unexpected treasure?" Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220201 22:14 PST
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