US culture has gone through its fair share of ‘retro’ periods, but none has been quite so enduring and tenacious as our revisitation to the 1980s. I believe that this is because our attachment and willingness to return to our innocent childhoods in the 80s is directly proportional to how dissatisfied we are with the way the world operates today. That, and Men Without Hats were pretty amazing.

The recent 25th anniversary of GI Joe surely brought my generation a bit of cognitive dissonance. While our general unhappiness with the government seems to dominate our mindset (until recently), GI Joe also represents that same government. Of course, GI Joe actually represents the government what we wish we had – America’s secret fightin’ team faces off against hissing terrorists with a penchant for stealing the Statue of Liberty and emerge victorious, mitigating damage to the point where the whole situation ends with a hearty laugh and the bad guys sulk away, soundly humiliated. Those guys got stuff done, dammit.

Do we need all of these re-envisionings of our childhood heroes into super-exploding, larger than life, realistic movies? Absolutely not, but maybe the eleven and twelve year olds of today do. Cel animation just doesn’t charm like it used to.

Shout! Factory’s release of GI Joe Season 1.1 has all of this, plus gigantic rub-on tattoos. Unless your kid has serious glandular problems, it’s pretty obvious that these are meant for the adult collector. These would dwarf lesser arms. This is just one of many indications that this set has been made for the collectors.

All 22 episodes remain firmly intact across four discs, complete with animation blips, ‘we’ll be right back’ bumpers and credits that feature the original Hasbro logo. It’s as close to the original airings as possible, which collectors will definitely appreciate. The set also includes a booklet with handy episode synopses, which might help you pinpoint that favorite episode across one of the many 5-episode arcs. Given how often we have to suffer through poorly ‘remastered’ versions of things, this is awesome.

DVD bonuses include a three-part interview with one of the original authors, which runs for about 20 minutes in total. While an insight into the process of writing something both narrative and toyetic is interesting, it’s a little dry and definitely for dedicated fans.

Of special interest to me is the original 1963 GI Joe 12” figure presentation that Hasbro showed to press and investors at the 1963 Toy Fair. As a Toy Fair attendee, I am very comforted by the fact that Hasbro’s been boring the living snot out of people with patronizing presentations for decades, and that it’s not just me. I loves ya, Hasbro, but 2 hours of Powerpoint? I got a cramp in my everything and I never wanted to see another toy again.

The DVD also presents some original, and oft parodied (warning : link NSFW!), ‘Knowledge is Half the Battle’ PSAs – six in all. Future anthropologists will surely wonder about the IQ of the 20th century, what with animated kids swimming in thunderstorms and eating glass and playing in traffic.

With this release of GI Joe on DVD, we’re one step closer towards completing the holy quartet of 1980s boy cartoons. We already have handsome editions of Thundercats and Masters of the Universe, so with Shout!’s GI Joe and Transformers reissues, both pure in their content and presentation, we’re almost there.

And, appropriately, happy Fourth of July.

My blog today concerns the reader that wants to dispose of a few items or a collection. 

I’m one of five writers on Collectors’ Quest (CQ) and we all get questions on value and how to rid yourself of your once prized items (hopefully, at a profit.) We all have a sense of value on the items we discuss, but none of us qualify as appraisers.

 My recommendation has been to research the net for value and check local shops for comparable prices in your area. Many good resale or antique shops will tell you the retail price and what they are currently willing to pay (the wholesale price). Normally these prices are based on their knowledge of the current market in your area, how long they may wind up holding onto it before it is going to sell and what is not selling. A check of several stores may reveal a difference in price, based on different clientèle purchasing habits. It’s the same on net sites where you want to see the average selling price not the asking price.

You may want extra cash for a new play thing, computer, flat screen or fishing motor. Could be your cash flow is down due to a layoff and the extra cash is more important than your signed artworks. Or maybe your last child started full time school and you’re bored, and see potential in selling off designer clothing the grandparents flooded the kid with. Could be you just retired and finally have time to thin out your stacks of stuff before you move south.
These are all good reasons to explore selling a collection.

My first suggestion, of course, is to place your collection on Collectors’ Quest – Marketplace using the “tab” above. The easy sign-up and step by step instructions will guide you through the process, and all you will need to start is a digital camera and an idea of the item’s real value. Our Market Place will work well for the collector down-sizing or selling a complete collection of like items.

If your collectibles are bath tubs or buffets, you probably want to use a service like Craig’s List with local pick up as your best bet.

Collectors with tons of high end pottery, china and old glass will do well with a site like TIAS, over the long haul.

A new site with strong early exposure,  I Collect 24-7, is a low cost venue for the collector with a broad range of different product to unload, with the restriction, it must be old stuff.

Esty is newer too, and deals with the artsy type collectibles.  I imagine you can suggest a few places on the web you might have found for selling your stuff, that you can add to my list  by writing a reply at the bottom.

Did I leave out the big elephant in the room? Yes Ebay. Not easy for the beginning net seller to deal with for all the requirement and restrictions imposed on the seller. But still the way of selling a good quantity of items with patience.

Which ever route to success you choose, remember this one rule:
It’s retail sales, the customer is always right, unless they’re wrong.
Buy Low and Sell High, unless you paid too much.
Pack your shipments, as if you’re going to receive it. You may, if you got the label wrong.
You can satisfy all of the customers some of the time, and some of the customers all of the time, but in sales you can’t satisfy all of the customers, all of the time.
In a future post I’ll give you some suggestions on how to handle inventory, cutting costs on packaging and shipping, and lots of incidental stuff you will need to be a successful on line seller.
Good Hunting, and if you can, hold onto your collections for better times.

U.K. numismatists have been in a buzz for a few days now – an unprecedented error has been released into circulation.  Through some accident of quality control, a number of 20p coins with the new reverse were minted with the old obverse.   Before 2009, the coin was dated on the reverse, so the new coins have the date moved to the front, next to the Queen’s head.    This means that  in the error coin the old un-dated front and the new un-dated back are put together on a single coin, making it the only non-dated U.K. coin in centuries.  It is actually a very subtle error, because, technically, neither side is incorrect in nature, but their pairing is the problem.   From the front, you would not be able to tell the error coin from a regular 2008 coin.   Flip them over, the same thing: you have to compare both sides to correctly identify the error.     Last week, the expected price these coins will bring is about £50 apiece, although eBay, of course, has prices ranging from £200 to an unheard-of £7000, depending on the day and the coin.

Curiously, the £50 price comes from a website undated20p.com, “brought to you by The London Mint Office” according to the tagline on their webpage.   The London Mint Office appears to be a collectible coin dealer, not connected with the actual Mint of the U.K.,  and they seem to have known about the undated 20p coin for a while.  According to their WHOIS registration, the domain name “undated20p.com” was originally registered in May, 2009.  They were pretty quick on the ball, since the first error showed up on eBay around that time.  At that time, the coin was selling for around £20, which would have been a good profit to re-sell to collectors at £50 each, until everybody and their brother started finding them and putting them on eBay.   About a week ago, the crazy multi-thousand sales hit, and for the past day there have been hundreds of them listed for sale.

Now, there’s far more of the 20p errors online than you can reasonably look through.    Don’t get excited about low prices, though: there are quite a few scammers out there trying to make a quick buck off the careless.   The face of the coin, remember, was the correct obverse for the 20p over the past years – it’s not supposed to have a date on the front, because the reverse is dated.   Unscrupulous sellers are taking average, everyday 20p coins and listing them as “UNDATED on one side”.  Well, of course – nearly every U.K. coin is undated on one side, because it’s on the other.   The key is the undated front and the undated back both appear on the same coin, otherwise you’re buying the same 20p coin that you’ve been able to get for years.   As of July 1st, the actual error 20p coin, in mint or near-mint condition, is actually selling in the £200 range, which I suspect will continue until people start to realize just how many are in circulation.   My uneducated guess is that there are thousands done in this manner, due to the way coins are minted.  This isn’t an accident where a couple half-molded planchets made it into the wrong pile; the coin was cleanly made and done according to the usual quality control standards, but just pressed with the wrong die on one side.   This in itself is a rare occurance, creating a rather historic error to add to your collection, but it will probably be in enough numbers that the original £20 price on eBay to the £50 pricetag from The London Mint Office will probably become the correct average price once the speculators are exhausted.

It was many a month ago that I read about a little company called Ponoko in Wired, or Make, or some other magazine that makes me look hip. Based in New Zealand, they used lasers to cut things up. As if the words ‘New Zealand’ weren’t enough to enchant the pants off of me, ‘lasers’ were just the icing on the proverbial cake. At this point, my pants were a distant memory at best.

Ponoko wasn’t cutting up just anything – they were cutting your designs into materials of your choice. As long as it was flat and you could plot it out using a vector graphics program, you could have it made. The possibilities kinda took over my whole brain, so when a Ponoko hub opened up in California, and I knew that I had to make something. Anything. I needed more lasers in my life.

No, this wasn’t like my obsession with the LEGO Creator program, where I made a giant $100 Iron Monger out of a pre-set collection of plastic pieces. I was going to make my very own pieces into my very own item. Making one laser-perfect item of my own devising was super exciting, but the idea that I could potentially make hundreds of identical items was even more amazing. All of these custom art toys, all of these shapes I’ve been seeing in my head, and all of these crazy items I’ve had in my head since high school were now makeable.

I immediately set to work sketching, measuring, analyzing materials and concocting plans to make a science fiction astronaut character out of flat pieces of 6.0mm thick wood. While the NZ hub has a huge array of materials readily available to fabricators, from fabrics to acrylic panels and fancy hardwoods, the US hub is still coming up to speed with their material complement. In the meantime, Ponoko has compensated for this difference by offering shipping prices from NZ comparable to shipping from CA. I wanted my stuff quick and easy, so I stuck to the US.

Because I didn’t expect my initial attempts at designing to fit together flawlessly, I plotted out two different prototypes – similar in shape and purpose but using completely different structures, one a little tricker than the other. After encountering a lot of difficulty with uploading the very specific files (which turned out to be a glitch on my end), and with some quick and personal help from Ponoko staff via e-mail and on their forums, I managed to get my prototypes uploaded into the system, which does a great job of altering you if something about your file is incomplete or incorrect.

Despite the US hub being hammered with orders, my designs were organized, cut and were in the mail to me in less than 24 hours. Potential designers should note that the pricing to make your stuff is determined by a lot of factors. You’re charged for your materials and the amount of time it takes for the laser to cut out your designs. The more lines you have, and the more complex the shape, the more it’ll cost you. This is where a bulk of the cost seems to come in. Shipping is also a little expensive, due to the special size requirements of most shipments exceeding typical packaging. If you buy a Ponoko membership, which is $39 a month, your costs will be significantly cheaper. I managed to save $17 in my first order alone. By order #2, the membership cost will almost completely cancel itself out.

The next week was spent in a state of nearly wetting myself with excitement, waiting for the Ponoko cut pieces to arrive. I spent the time making other components that would be used in the final product, and playing a whole lot of Evony, because the nearly-naked elf chick that Google Ads was showing me insisted upon it.

The pieces arrived on a Monday, right before work. It smelled like a delicious fireplace. All of the cut pieces rested safely in the cradle of the wood that they were cut out of, backed on both sides with a protective film to hold them in place, waiting for me to pop ‘em out. Despite some of these pieces being incredibly tiny, and as narrow as 1mm thick, everything was so perfectly cut that I was able to use every piece that popped out of the puzzle. And because of my precision measuring, and the ever-so-slight material loss because of the laser cut, all of my notches and grooves slid together with a perfection so excellent that it was almost poetic.

Since the prototypes worked with such ease, it’s now time to go back into the files and perfect them so that they’re optimized for cost and quantity, slipping in all of my needed pieces into the allotted spaces, leaving no empty, wasted space. There is where I can begin mass production – an army of original characters to take over the art world, or at least a few display shelves.

Official production pieces, pieces that are entirely handmade, and pieces that are handmade out of manufactured materials all have varied collectability and audiences, and all depend on the materials used, as well as the popularity of the artist. While my dreams of grandeur are mighty, we’ll see how my little spaceman fares. Perhaps it’s the first step towards a collectible empire. So, my thanks go out to Ponoko for finally making this collection of ideas finally real, and hopefully, the readers will swing on by and make some awesome stuff that I can collect too. It’s an awesome experience to see these things come to life. You can also visit the existing store of products and buy your own awesomely design-centric stuff.

Here’s a sneak peek of my Spaceman. Shhhh.

As a long-time buyer and seller of both antiques and collectibles, I am often asked “What is selling today? What are the trends and hot items?” I hate to say it, but I honestly do not know. Oh, I have some success stories; some surprises of things that sold higher than anticipated. Also a lot that have not ‘moved’ in over a year that were thought to be the ‘next absolute sure thing’ in the business.

I’ll give you some ideas of things that have recently sold. We set up our booth at the fantastic Elkhorn Antique Market, held 4 times a year at the Walworth Fair Grounds. It is definitely one of the best and you can always count on a large, top-notch crowd, come rain or shine (and we’ve sat through both.) The weather was picture perfect, high 70s, low humidity and sunny. (An occasional high wind made us treat glassware with caution, but that goes with the territory.)

We are very eclectic in our offerings and basically have no specific area. That’s because we hunt for things we like; unique items, not anything that limits us. We usually have 6 long ‘banquet’ tables, a card-table to check-out and we use turned over plastic containers to rest miscellaneous items on. We have locked glass cases with our ‘better offerings inside.’ The front of our booth usually has heavy metal and cast iron pieces, just because we don’t expect folks to want to carry them very far. (It makes sense except many times the buyer wants to leave their purchase with us until they are ready to head out, being reluctant to carry it around the fair. So we have to drag it to the back of the booth and into the van. Oh, well.)

In any case, I’ll give you an idea of some of the ‘mix’ that we sold. You be the judge as to what you’d buy to sell if you were a dealer.

Our first sale was a large metal Sealtest Ice Cream Sign. Definitely very old, with rust around the hanging holes to prove it. The second was a 1930s lady’s robe. Black with vibrant pink flowers, it was most likely silk. Sold to a young girl, perhaps in her early 20s, who was about 5′ 9” tall and weighing maybe 120 pounds, it fit her like a dream and she modeled for us, twirling around to show off the flouncy skirt. She was a fashion major at an Illinois college and was just thrilled. We next sold three watch fobs. Advertising pieces from local industrial giants that had long-ago changed hands or had left the industry. We then sold a cookie jar of a school house, probably from the 1960s. This went to a school teacher (but of course.)

An older gent sauntered into our booth. We both looked at him and recognized a repeat customer from the last show. He was a pig-collector and in fact had purchased a pig ‘oiler’ from us a while back. We were able to satisfy him with a carved wooden pig. He was so glad, paid promptly and carried it right out to his cart. We told him we’d keep an eye out for others and he vowed to return in August!

It got very crowded and neither hubby nor I had time to analyze what was selling. Not until we got home. Then we sat down to have a beverage and count the ‘loot.’ We tried to recall everything that we had sold. He remembered another ice cream sign, this one lit up, and also a cast iron stove door, an antique for sure. How about the advertising crates? Yup, sold two of those, in spite of being next to a real pro who specialized in all sorts of them. We had several pieces of carnival glass, lots of lookers, no takers. I remembered the canvas golf bag that sold. We had Sam Snead golf clubs inside but they were not of interest. The same gent bought a few wooden shafted clubs as well. The buyer shared with us that he was a heavy-duty collector and had over 2,000 clubs!

I had recently purchased a ‘lot’ of contemporary sterling silver pins and rings. We sold about 15 of those, nothing over $20. Hubby put a rack up with $2 necklaces, not too fancy, but we sold 10 of those too. My ‘best jewelry’, some signed rhinestone pins, a few cameos and even a pocket watch did not sell.

Another item that sold late in the day was a Milwaukee Brewers lunch box with the famous ‘racing sausages’ on the outside. We also sold 6 beer steins, some with the name of a brewery, others with just a German scene. Some linens sold too – a baby quilt and 10-12 doilies.

While in Ohio this winter, we purchased a very unusual item; a Snow Scoot. It is a type of sled with one runner over the seat. Folks would actually rent these from the park (still had a number ‘8′ on the side) and hurl themselves downhill. Boy, consider the potential litigation on that item! It was purchased by a collector of sleds who often lent his items to a small museum near his home in northern Wisconsin. He was just beaming as he carried it out!

We sold two paperweights, a few books, some wooden print blocks, several beer bottles and a pair of leather saddlebags for a motorcycle.

This should give you an idea of the mix that we offer and items that were purchased. If you can see a ‘trend’ from this assortment, you are a far better antiquer than I am. (But, that’s what makes it so darn interesting.)