On Seller Greed And Buyer Stupidity

An up-date.  I know you are all anxious to find out what the £50 reduced to £25 concrete gnome sold for at a VERY frosty auction.  £5.00.  Chancers luck.
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This item has been re-listed several times on Ebay and from the description you will see why:

Item specifics

Condition: Acceptable : Split the cost with friends

Seller notes:“Dust jacket absent with major damage to the spine and boards including a missing spine, bumped corners and soiling. Inscribed on the front and back end-papers. A number of the images have been coloured in, with annotations and underlinings throughout. The page edges are tanned and a little dusty with foxing creeping into occasional pages. This book is beginning to show its age with usual signs of wear and damage to the binding, including damage to the hinges inside both boards. GRADED COMMENSURATE WITH AGE OF BOOK DUST JACKET ABSENT PLEASE BE AWARE THIS BOOK IS PRE 1965 AND THE GRADE WILL REFLECT IT'S AGE”

To which I can only respond with a derisory "bollocks, mate!" And I am being serious here though I am not naming the 'trader' because I found others linked to Ebay and Amazon asking anywhere from £25-£65.00 for this and another Swan album.

They all use the con-man phrases of "Very rare" or "THE GRADE WILL REFLECT IT'S AGE" -meaning it is old and tatty but you will never find another bargain like this.  The implication is also that the book(s) are so rare that if you buy it you can later sell it for what you want.

The fact that this particular seller has re-listed the book three times to my knowledge proves the lie in that.

This is like going into W. H. Smith and being offered a 2013 Dandy annual for £40 that they found battered and moldy in a corner: "Well, you know how popular the Dandy is and you will NOT find another 2013 annual in shops....oh, someone scribbled in it and the spine is battered but this reflects its age."  As an example a 2013 Dandy Annual is going for 99p to £2.80 on Ebay but there is this item:

"THE DANDY COMIC THE LAST EVER ISSUE AND THE DANDY ANNUAL 2013 - BRAND NEW"

"Only" £19.95 but you can get the gift set 2013 Beano and Dandy Annuals (2 annuals!)  for £2.00 and a copy of the last ever Dandy comic will cost you between £2.35-£3.00 that is all three for £4.35 -£5.00. Where the feck do you get £19.95 (oh, and add the postage) from?

Chancers and con-men.

Take a look at my copy of the same 1954 Slick Fun Album that arrived yesterday.  Shiny cover, no damage and apart from a 1 inch tear of one page margin near the spine, perfect.  The paper quality is great, not 100% but we were still on paper rationing back then.  

Cost? £7.50 WITH postage and packaging.  That is correct because there is no "huge collectors market" for Swan books -I've picked up comics for £2.00 in pristine condition.  

The most I ever paid for a Swan album was £10.00 which included p&p and I paid that because there was something specific within I needed.  As it turned out I got a complete refund when I found 4 pages missing but the strip I wanted was intact.  The dealer:"These pop up all the time I just never checked inside this copy"

There were THOUSANDS of these books printed and I have talked with reputable dealers who handle comic annuals and we all agreed that, based upon the market interest (usually people fooled into believing they are buying printed gold!), quality of paper/print and the fact that about 99.9% of the creators had never been major names (on that I disagree as E. H. Banger -pronounced as in "ranger"- was a major contributor to Platinum, Golden and even Silver Ages comics though his work has been belittled by many morons who claim to be comic historians) then £5-7.00 for an annual is a decent price.

If you, as comickers, keep buying these books at over-inflated prices then the crooks will keep increasing the prices.  It just means they make a huge profit and you have lost money and have a book worth £5-7.00 and unless you are an over zealous fan it is just an over-priced book.

It's rather like the 1970s "banned" UK Action weekly comic issues -one for sale on Ebay had reached £700 an hour ago.  Here is a truth that I was told by the bosses at the company: they still sold the banned issues but "one had to pretend to maintain order".  So, there are many more "banned" issue copies out there than you think because the whole industry was crooked and had its ways -burn books that cost money?  Yeah. Right.

'Rare' Alan Class copies going for £20-35 each.  That's a crook trader and a VERY dumb buyer. For any Class comic a standard price would be £2.50 max if you really wanted that issue.  Fantastic weekly "Ultra/Very rare Silver Age"...the joke is that thousands of copies of this comic are sold every month on Ebay...that is a LOT of very rare/ultra rare comics! 

Some utter moron, I'm sorry but he/she is, purchased a copy of the old print Comic Bits as a "rare silver age fanzine" -"rare"/"silver age" and "fanzine" being very false for the first two and "shady" with the third. I still have copies.  Oh, the moron paid £28.00 and £5.00 postage (???? for an A5 42 pager).

I remember about five years ago a BBC TV day time antique show (sell your old junk mainly -Cash In The Attic?) had their expert ("X" =the Unknown and "spurt" is a drip under pressure) look at a 1969 Star Trek Annual.  "Well, it's 1960s and Star Trek so you can ask £30 for it!" he declared as only chancers do.  Did it sell? No.  

In charity shops and two comic shops the same annual was on sale for £1.50.  

Similar price on Ebay...until Leonard Nimoy died and prices hit £25-40.00....why???  Leonard Nimoy did not write nor draw nor have any connection with these reprints of Gold Key comics other than there was a character called "Mr Spock".  Go on, sell the annual for the price you paid on Ebay.

But the greed goes on and as someone once wrote: "there is one born every minute" -a recent Batman issue had an asking price, on the same day as it was on sale in comic shops, of $12-19.00!  One long time comicker wrote online "F*** this. I'm waiting til it goes into the back issue bins!"  And guess what? Some of those selling the book at a high price were found to be shop owners who had not "been able to get hold of enough copies" for their standing orders...at the regular price.  And the old "I doubt we can get a copy as they've sold out" ploy was used.  One man purchased a copy online after being told this but next visit to the shop "We actually managed to get a copy for you after a lot of effort so its a bit dearer in price" -YES. The ploy I wrote about in a previous post.

When it was tried on me I said "Too bad. I got my copy online because you said you COULD NOT get a copy" (furious, whining shop staff).

You are an enabler if you allow this.  Seriously, draw a line!

I have a foot high concrete, mass produced gnome in my garden. An antique programme just on the TV had a dealer wanting £50 but he got knocked down to £25. 

Suckers.