Flaws in Price Guides: A Letter To Publishers

I'm not a fan of price guides. If you are a publisher in this area, you might want to know why...

I find their prices are often out of whack, & to further puzzle the user, you have no idea of how they really came up with those prices. The prices are temporary anyway. Mere reflections or simple gauges for an item's level of desire in a fickle, faddish world; One note in a long opera on a passion that ebbs & flows.

There are many other pricing points, but those can be discussed at another time. Suffice it for now to say that price guides frustrate not only the seller looking to put a fair price on the object, but it frustrates a collector as well.

Collectors are not big fans of price guides. It may sound odd, especially to sellers on such venues as eBay, who think that buyers are all about buying things as cheap as they can get them, but it's true. Buyers enjoy deals, but we do not typically look up prices to see if they are 'fair.' When we want something, the only time price enters into it, is when we check our PayPal & other accounts to see how much money we have available to pay for an item. Price isn't the object, the object is the object -- and we seek the object for love

And we know, all too well, that love has it's price.

But collectors love to know more about what they collect. Sometimes, once & awhile, we look at the collectible area in book stores, to see if the shelves offer us what we need: information about our passion.

This information isn't about how the high price went for an object at an auction in New York in 1995 – we are not shopping from this guide, mistaking it for a catalog we could order from. We do not seek information on how condition affects price – we are the ones that determine that equation. We do not need a list of possible 'flaws' that our beloved objects may be prone to – we are passionate enough to know these things on site, & we know where to look for those things.

What we do want, is information about our adored things.

We want history & lore. We'll even take a dirty limerick if it has our prized collectible category or items in it. We want images – both literal photographs, and the ones we paint in our minds as we read about the things we desire. We want to swoon & drool over those images, heady with the thought of touching them, owning them...

When publishers & authors learn this fact, this one facet on the gem of collecting, perhaps they will begin to offer books which feed a collector's soul, almost as well as the objects themselves. If they write it, we will come.

Article by Pop_Tart


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