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I adore Cliff Aliperti. I ought to be jealous; he does what most of us dream of — making a full-time living off doing what he loves, dealing with collectibles. But in this case, my envy over such a lifestyle is overcome by my feelings of camaraderie with Cliff who identifies himself as a obsessed, addicted, collector-historian with definite hoarder tendencies.

#1 How did you get interested in collecting and what do you collect?

I started collecting baseball cards like a lot of kids when I was about 7 years old. My dad had collected cards as a kid (and some of his survived), then comic books, and was seriously into stamps and eventually came back to baseball cards himself. My Uncle has been a baseball card dealer since 1979. Beyond baseball cards, growing up I had spurts of collecting stamps, coins, newspapers, and more and in adulthood have gone the sports collectible route, rediscovered comic books, collected modern first editions for a bit. I like clutter. I mean I have collections that I barely put effort into but somehow amount to enough items to create a collection — pens and book ends come to mind. I like having it all, by this I mean, if I’ve got something, I want more of it then all of it. I tend to take my interests to extremes.

Now I think of myself mostly as a dealer — I tend to think of my collection as the items I archive on my web sites as I sell them. So in that general sense I collect Movie Cards and Collectibles from the Silent Age through the Golden Age and General Magazine Back Issues from the Nineteenth Century to present. More specifically, I do have a small but varied collection of items featuring the 1930s and 40s actor Warren William — those aren’t for sale. My collections tend to be the tiniest slice of a niche. I’m not active at it now, but I was collecting information, articles, ephemera and trinkets related to President James K. Polk at one time too. I also have my DVD collection, though I tend to only think of vintage items as those I’ve collected.

Warren William Film Poster

#2 What is the ‘crown jewel’ of your collection?

Tough question. My dealer mentality says everything is for sale… But I guess my favorites right now are a couple of movie posters featuring Warren William that I’m trying to figure out how to frame at a reasonable cost. Actually I know how, but have been putting off getting the materials for a long time.

#3 What’s your criteria for selling vs. keeping? Is it difficult to make such decisions?

It’s pretty much all for sale. I don’t buy anything, even items for my little Warren William or James K. Polk collections, without knowing I can flip it for more than I paid. If you’re working on a budget you’ve got to have rules, that’s mine.

#4 What two characteristics or personal traits you feel are essential to being a collector?

No wrong answer here, though lots of different ones. I think it’s going to come down to what the person you ask believes about themselves, and so I’ll say 1) Attention to detail. What’s the use of putting a collection together if you aren’t taking a deep interest in the subject of the collection. You want to know it all and you’re hunting down any loose info in your spare hours. 2) Storage space.

#5 As a collector/dealer, what’s the one thing you cannot live without?

Nowadays, I’d say my internet connection. It blows my mind that back when I did baseball card shows I used to rely on a couple of magazine & trade paper subscriptions and attending shows where I’d either see the same buyers (or sellers, depending on which side of the table I was on). If my internet goes down for any length of time, I’m probably out of business.

Kromo Gravure Trading Card of Mary Pickford c.1917

#6 How many hours a week do you think you spend collecting? (This includes, but is not limited to: shopping for items to purchase, admiring or talking about your collection, blogging/writing about your collection, attending shows/events, researching, dusting. Feel free to give breakdowns &/or rationalizations if you’d like.)

Hah, basically you want my work week. Well, it’s pretty crazy, but it’s filled with passion and I love it. Every waking hour is close to the correct answer here, but I’d say an accurate count would be about 12-16 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week. I prepare sales listings during the afternoon, which also consists of researching items. I tackle blog posts, at Vintage Meld & Profiles & Premiums & for example, and my column at the Examiner.com at night. I do most of the work on my static web sites over the weekends. I keep very busy, and again, it’s great!

#7 We’ve all heard that eBay killed the mom & pop antiques store/mall… Do you agree? Disagree?

Killed it? No. Antiques and Collectibles dealers have never had so much opportunity in history. I can recall before I ever did anything online going into a rare book shop in the neighborhood and being excited when I saw the elderly proprietor entering items for sale into his computer as I browsed. My Uncle, the card show dealer, he’s the one who first showed me eBay sometime in ‘99 and I was completely blown away. If the mom & pop antique mall is dead or dying chalk it up to progress. We can lament the death of the VHS tape too, or we can buy a DVD, Blu-Ray or just download the damn thing. Take advantage of the available resources and more possibilities can open up than ever before.

#8 We all have our usual collector haunts online (websites, communities, blogs etc.), places we regularly read &/or ‘talk’ at. Please list your top three for us.

Hah, most definitely twitter, @moviecollector and @andotherstuff. I comment as often as is relevant on Marty Weil’s ephemera blog. And NewspaperArchive.com.

Vintage Look Magazine With Marilyn Monroe Cover

#9 Do you have collecting ‘bibles’?

A The Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide made me a good deal of money when it came out, pointing out key magazine issues often overlooked by online sellers. Now I just found Dr. Steven Lomazow’s American Periodicals: A Collector’s Manual and Reference Guide through a post on Marty Weil’s blog — hoping that’s the next great resource for me.

B Sports Collectors Digest Standard Catalog of Sports Memorabilia — Love the detailed sections on sports magazines.

C A little spiral bound self-published guide titled Dixie Premiums Checklist by Tom Popelka which I purchased from the author himself on eBay. Extremely niche subject but provides instant identification of any Dixie Premium I handle, which is important to me.

#10 Did you ever get an item so cheaply that you felt like a thief? Ever stumble into such a great find that your fingers shook when you picked it up?

Oh, this is kind of commonplace for me, I’m looking for the big mark-up, and yes, I can get a little shaky or light-headed when I really score. I don’t have the pics, but I’ll tell a similar story from the old days. I was doing one of the bigger card shows in the area and these guys from St. Louis were also doing the show. They were very interested in a 1965 Topps Steve Carlton rookie card I had for sale (Carlton began with the Cardinals). After being asked about the possibility of a trade I went over to their table and they had the oddball type stuff I liked. This was the early 90s, so I was deliriously happy to deal the card, which I’d graded in the EX to EX+ range for a boxful of 60-70 St. Louis Cardinals programs from the 1940s and 50s. I was so happy I left a friend at the table and took a walk to calm myself down.

I came back and my friend tells me, “Those guys you traded with just came over and called you a crook!” What! “They said the card was trimmed.” So I went over, they showed me the measurements, I apologized profusely, and insisted we reverse the trade. I just handled too many cards to measure them all and had never really been exposed to any fraud such as that. So I took back my Carlton rookie card, which I just thought scored myself the motherlode of vintage baseball programs, and wound up cutting it’s price to a tenth of what it had been marked. Elation to frustration all in a few minutes.

#11 We all love our collections, but how much… If you were stranded on a deserted island, would you selfishly want your items with you, or would you prefer they were safely protected back at home?

Give me movies and I’ll be happy. Lock down my stock and protect my eBay feedback!

#12 What is the most ‘over the top’ item in your collection? Something you paid the most for, is the most mocked by others, an item you went to great lengths to get, was once greatly desired by you but now seems silly, or, somehow, is otherwise outrageous or has an outrageous story behind it…

I try not to make buying mistakes, so let me think… Okay, let me preface this by saying autographs scare me to death. I don’t trust them unless I get them in person. In fact I can barely understand the desire to acquire them when not acquired in person — well, I do get it, part of the collecting bug, but with the inherit danger of fraud and the lack of personal contact I just never really got why autograph collecting was so big. Anyway, I mentioned I collect items of the actor Warren William, right? I don’t know if I should really circulate this info, but what the heck — there’s a price I’ll pay for Warren William autographs, and he died in 1948, so they’re not terribly common, and I pay up to my price just assuming I’m buying a fake.

A Real Warren William Autograph?

I can never be disappointed that way, right? Even I think that’s kind of silly. Maybe someone can tell me if this one is a fake or not

#13 What ‘holy grail’ are you currently seeking for your collection?

I hate to dodge this, but really, from my perspective my holy grail is just the next cool item I need to have — I don’t know what it is yet. It might be an item for myself, more likely it’ll be an item for resale that I haven’t seen before and want to research. It goes back to your question when I talked about taking a deep interest in your collection. My passion is identifying and researching items that I don’t know about and can’t find any info about. So to answer this one, I’d say “the unknown.”

“The unknown,” that has to be my favorite answer of all time. Amen, Cliff, amen.

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Even without ever having seen Gigantor as a young kid, we all knew the theme song. It was just one of those cultural things that stuck in the collective consciousness (at least locally) like the 1960s Spider-Man song, and sung while tearing around the yard and beating each other up.

The first exposure that I actually had to Gigantor was last year, during a few sleepless nights when [adult swim] decided, in their signature random style, to air really old Japanese cartoons at 5 AM. There was something absolutely comforting about the weirdness of it, and the shades of grey, the haze, and the idea that it has been around since 1953 – but one thing is really obvious. You don’t look at Gigantor and immediately think ‘this is a great cartoon’. You probably think the opposite.

Gigantor is a cartoon series with well over 400 episodes created during its initial run in Japan, which spanned 1953 to 1968. It wasn’t until 1966 that about 50 episodes were re-dubbed into English and edited to omit certain violent situations, making it more suitable to US audiences. Robot ‘Tetsujin-28′ (literally, ‘Iron Man 28′), was renamed Gigantor, kid ‘Shotaro Kaneda’ becomes Jimmy Sparks, and so on. Everything is subsequently made a little more goofy, and US audiences are exposed to some early Japanese animation (though the show arrived in the US after Astro Boy). Thus began a general dumbing-down of anime that continues even today and cripples its ability to tell a compelling story for general consumption – but I digress.

The animation of Gigantor isn’t complex or beautiful, but it’s absolutely masterful from a minimalist perspective. You’ll be hard pressed to find a scene that involves more than six frames of unique animation, the animators usually opting to re-use a loop of three or four cels to simulate action, or panning across something to simulate movement. It does so much with so little that it’s really worth a study for anyone interested in animation – not unlike Jack Kirby’s ability to animate an entire scene with the expressions, shadows and angles he drew into singular comic panels, Gigantor tells an animated story in no uncertain terms – though Kirby was far from minimalist in his details depictions of things, the same principle of succint, economical storytelling is there.

It’s easy to see the influence of Gigantor on later anime, especially with the general aesthetic of the characters in shows like Lupin the Third, so it’s an important show, even if it pales in comparison to today’s cartoons. It has story arcs that last through multiple episodes, recurring enemies, and more thematic coherence than any cartoon of its day. The 4-disc set includes commentary on three early episodes by Fred Ladd – the man responsible for bringing Gigantor to the US and re-writing the show to appeal to US audiences and sync with the English language. The set also includes a thorough 30-minute interview with Ladd, who discusses his role in making Gigantor appear on US television, and a 30-minute interview with animation historial Fred Patten, who discusses the nature of the original Japanese show. They’re definitely thoughtful extras to include.

Also included on the DVD itself are the first 6 issues of the Gigantor comic book, published by Antarctic Press in 2000. Since the whole series lasted 12 issues, one might presume that the remaining 6 issues will be included in the second Gigantor DVD set, due out in September.

It’s a handsome set, slipcased and with a book describing the 26 episodes included. Collectors note that this is essentially a re-release of the set that Rhino released (and has since discontinued) in 2002 – same extras and all, with a biography replaced with the aforementioned comic issues.

While so many different shows influences animation in so many different directions, Gigantor is somewhere at the core of the earliest seeds of this stuff, and watching it feels like an intellectual study of the whole art form – and it definitely couldn’t be presented any better than it is here, true to the source material and respectfully encapsulated. Giant robot television at its best.

While most of us will not be filling our double wides with the likes of what I wanted to see, and while wifes’ purchases were very modest, it’s the thrill of seeing these incredible objects and learning all that I can about the findings these dealers were able to bring together.

Friday was the first of the three day Delefield Antique Show that I had wanted to attend for several years but just never seemed to find the time. This year it was put on our priority list. Friday evening was the kick off and I was there with pen and camera in hand to see what all the hub-bub was about. The location was in the historic Delafield Hotel in historic Downtown Delafield, WI. The perfect setting to view and learn more about Early American and English antiques from the more than seventy dealers assembled with their wonderful array of true antiques. The name plates in each booth provided the attendee’s business name and their home location. While many were from Wisconsin and the surrounding states, others traveled from Missouri, Connecticut, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virgina, and Ohio to present their unique wares in this fashionable setting. From the looks of the early crowd, lots of interest was generated and sold tags were seen on many items, too large to hand carry out the door.

Paintings were prevalent, furniture abundant and metal objects of silver and brass, brilliantly polished.

As I toured the show, I was very impressed with the great variety of items, and played a guessing game of “the price is right” with myself, trying to determine an object’s value before looking at the price tag. (I’m not very good at this game.) And when it comes to paintings, I have no clue, guessing low on high priced masterpieces and way high on eighteenth century paint by numbers with a subject only the artist and I would think was worthy of using a good canvas and paint.

Asking questions of the dealers always brings a detailed response and I consider these events as my chance to learn from experts. I was fortunate enough to visit with a several that allowed me to photograph their booths and discuss some details beyond their inventory. Often these interviews were interrupted with questions from customers, so I try to observe more than quiz a busy person.

Several common themes arise from this show’s participants: an early interest in old things, years of collecting and later selling what they like, good contacts for locating rare antiques, and constant education. The benefits most enjoy are the returning customer base, foreign travel and camaraderie with like minded individuals.

My first chat was with Nancy Andrich of Nancy Andrich Antiques, who along with her daughter, travel to the UK on buying trips, and had lots of small decorative gems. Nancy said she had been doing the Delafield show for at least ten years and also was a participant at the Northern Illinois Antique Dealers Association Shows, and the Wisconsin Antique Dealers shows, where I remembered seeing her before.

The Harley Davidson sign in Tom and Marcia Brown’s booth caught my eye. Living in Wisconsin, we celebrate all things Harley. Marcia mentioned Willie G. had stopped to admire the sign. Made of sheet metal this fine old display piece was tempting, and I hope it found a home in our state.

This couple from Indiana live in an 1800s home and show about twelve times a year around the Mid-west. Tom has worked as a full time dealer for about twelve years, and we had a nice chat on our common interest in old homes, even if mine is but a pup compared to theirs.

Harold Cole (Antiques) of Woodbury, Connecticut has forty-five years of antique experience, featuring Early American and American folk art with a special interest in weather vanes. Harold sells through the Wales Antique Center in Wales, Wisconsin and had shops in Wiscasett, Maine and Woodbury, Connecticut.

The last interview, again shortened by paying customers, was with Randall Hopkins (Art and Antiques) with a shop in Madison, Wisconsin. His specialty of English and American period furnitures, oil paintings and decorative accessories. I was enthralled by the English silver pieces he had to offer.

Did I learn enough to join the ranks of these dealers? An emphatic NO. But we keep learning and that’s what makes for a happy collector, one that learns and understands as much as we can about our collections, so that when an item of value is offered we’ll have the insight to purchase and figure out later how to cover the check. Good Hunting my collecting community friends, hope to see you at my next shopping stop.

Vintage Squeaky Toy Duck

Once upon a time I used to go in and scour thrift shops for vintage stuff — every section had the opportunity to find some old thing sold at regular thrift store prices. One of my first real scores on eBay was an old squeaky toy I bought at a thrift shop for a quarter — and sold for $49. That was a nice mark-up for me and, as I had literally snatched the vintage toy from the jaws of some puppy, a nice salvage for the collector.

I used to feel kinda dirty about admitting to profiting from such activities — but then, I was the one rolling my sleeves up and getting dirty sifting through all the stuff in order to find the gems. That’s what pickers and dealers do; we are paid, in part, for the service of finding needles in haystacks. We squeak livings out of finding the treasures in trash. (And, if we’re lucky, we can make a few bucks tossing out trite metaphors when we write about it too.)

But then eBay and Roadshow (or, perhaps more accurately, the press about them) hit the upswing and everything thought to be 10 years old or older at thrift shops went into glass cases and was marked at antiques prices.

I’m not saying that thrift stores shouldn’t make or don’t deserve the extra money (even though at many times in my life, my “fishing” at their stores to resell some of their inventory at a profit kept me away from being “given the fish” of their services). But what I am saying is that the thrill of hunting was hugely dented by having the wheat separated from the chaff — and it was irritating to have those doing the separating be so unaware of the actual value of what they had. I mean just because it’s “old,” it doesn’t mean it has any particular value. Like icky sticky bald plastic doll torsos with green marks for $15? Puh-leeze. And please note that a 50 year old Book Club edition — even in a dust jacket — has no value to collectors, so stop putting those books in cases and pricing them at $25 or more. (And why, if you think it’s worth $25, do you place a sticker on the fragile old paper?)

Vintage Made In Japan Rubber Toy Elephant

It’s not that I want these things, at any price, but this inflated-prices-for-no-real-reason stuff is ridiculous — especially when you have to wait for a clerk to help you so that you can see that the pink spaghetti poodle has been placed with it’s blind rhinestone-less eye, broken-off leg, and poorly glued tail facing away from the glass, and no you won’t be paying $19.95 for it, thankyouverymuch, no matter how annoyed &/or condescending the eyeball roll you receive is.

Arg!

So, for awhile, I just avoided the glass cases & the “staff only” shelves behind the wrap desks; I didn’t even want to see what was there or the prices on the stickers. I just contented myself with the very slim pickings other areas. But lately I’ve returned to looking at the glass cases again.

First it was to laugh, maybe a bit bitterly in (at) some cases, but I was looking again. And I’ll admit I’ve been finding some super scores in the protected “antiques” areas. I even found a number of vintage rubber squeaky toys too.

It’s nice to see a sense of realism hitting again. It thrills me because I want to keep hunting or fishing (or whatever food metaphors fit) at thrift shops. Not just to squeak out a living, but because I’m a picker who grins at the thrill of the hunt.

The U.S. Postal Service has been working hard to prepare for next month’s big event: in case you haven’t heard, the postage rates are going up.  If you’re a stamp collector, this means a boon:  new stamps have to be printed with the new rates.   The Post Office haven’t released any new stamps since February, when they did a new run of the “Forever” stamps, to help cover the gap, but over the past couple weeks a bunch of new stamps have been release, and some more are still coming:

Illustrator Nancy Stahl designed this striking image of a polar bear based on a composite of several photographs of these ursine neighbors to the north.   This appears to be another entry is Stahl’s series of animal postage stamps, which include 2003’s snowy egret and the 2007 Florida panther.   This stamp is priced at the new post-card rate, so it’s going to cause a bit of dissonance to be mailing out your “Greetings from Sunny Florida!” postcards stamped with a polar bear.   Anyhow, I like Stahl’s style, and her animal stamps have a funky art deco feel in cool colors, which makes her stamps wonderful little works of art. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, this is my favorite new stamp in recent months.

The first stamp to come out at the new rates was the Richard Right commemorative stamp.  Wright was known for his powerful works on racism in the United States, most notably the novel Native Son, and his biography Black Boy.  This stamp has the most collectible appeal of the stamps released so far (well, until May 9th; see below), as the 25th entry in the USPS’ long-lived postage stamp series, Literary Arts, which started in 1979 with John Steinbeck.   This stamp was the first to be released at the new rates, back on April 9th, and priced at the new two-ounce rate.

The Wright stamp will be the only one at that rate until May 11th, when it will be joined by a two-ounce stamp depicting a wedding cake.  In preparation for the June wedding season, the USPS has designed two special stamp with a wedding theme, as they’ve done in previous years.  The Wedding Cake is a two-ounce rate for heavier mailings, and a interlocked pair of wedding rings is issued as a 44-cent one-ounce regular rate stamp.  Not quite a ‘wedding’ theme, lovebirds may mail their invitations with the “Love King and Queen of Hearts” stamp pairing, making the romantic and relationship count of new stamp designs to four.  If you’re a traditionalist when it comes to your postage, the USPS has re-released the Purple Heart stamp at the new rate, along with a new generic “American Flag” stamp from a design by Georgia photographer Rick Barrentine.

Probably the most anticipated stamp series will be released just before the rate increase on May 9th:   the five-piece stamp set honoring The Simpsons, that long-running animated Fox television show.   Television shows depicted on a postage stamp isn’t unusual — this fall there will be a ‘Early Television Memories’ series of stamps — but this is the first television-related stamp series to be released while the show is still on the air.  Given that the Simpsons has been on the air for twenty years, there’s a lot of things that have happened while the show has been on the air.   The design of the stamps is a bit rougher than what appears on the show, which hails back to The Simpsons origin on The Tracey Ullman Show: the images used for the stamps were designed by Matt Groening himself, giving the designs that hand-drawn feel familiar from his Life In Hell comic and early animations.   While I’m no expert on the topic, I’d say that the Homer Simpson is the first stamp to depict a person mid-belch (although the 4-cent 1930 stamp of President Taft is a possible contender).  Considering the fan demand for these stamps, stamp collectors should get in line right away — I predict that, even though they are released at the usual one-ounce rate, few of these stamps will end up on letters, with most ending up, as full booklets, in the folders and hands of a variety of collectors, whether they’re philatelists, animation fans, or Simpsons geeks.   If you plan on getting your own Simpsons stamps, realize one booklet isn’t enough: the back of the booklet comes in four different designs, with Marge and Maggie sharing one, but each of the others devoted to Homer, Bart, and Lisa.  These will also be a set to watch for errors on, as their widespread appeal will mean the regular stamps will probably not have a huge secondary market, but any errors will demand attention due to their familiarity with the public.