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Looking at a Large DC Copper Age Collection
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206 posts in this topic

This is an absolute 100% no brainer. Your friend is offering you free money.

If you pass on it, send him my way and I will buy these books in two seconds. At $25 per long, you're looking at $2100. You can double that back in an afternoon going through MCS' buying service. There are hidden keys in there that you can very quickly move on eBay for some nice money.

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If they are sorted, based on this list, you can quickly pull out real books. Note this is totally off the top of my head and not in any way a complete list

Batman 386, 400, 401, 404-407, 414, 426-429, 492, 570, 635, 655, 656
Detective 737, 871-878
Wonder Woman all Adam Hughes covers but especially 184
Catwoman second series all Adam Hughes covers
Preacher 1, 12, 66
Fables 1, 5
Trans metropolitan 1
Fables 1
Suicide Squad 1, 2, 48, 60
Harley Quinn all

my assumption is also that there are multiple other DC books - there are a lot of books from this time frame that do surprisingly well on eBay - you would think they're all trash books - and if they're sorted it doesn't take any time to walk through it. Again, this is free money. I'm very serious. If you pass on this, let me know and I'll send my son in Savannah down there to pick these up and give you a finder's fee.

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50 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

At $25 per long, you're looking at $2100. 

$25 x 60 = $1500

53 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

You can double that back in an afternoon going through MCS' buying service.

And what do you do with the other 59 long boxes? ;)

 

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1 minute ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

$25 x 60 = $1500

And what do you do with the other 59 long boxes? ;)

 

I was told there would be no math. Add $600 for shipping.

Who cares what you do with the other boxes? After I cream them and pull the MCS ones, figure I've got 55 long boxes left?

They're gone in a week because around here, I can donate them to this library, or this library, or this library, or this (2 miles from my house!) library, or this one, where I've found monster Copper keys and they take literally everything, or this one, where they will UNLOAD from your truck for you while you have coffee! 

OR I can leave them in my garage until October and truck them up to Baltimore, where I can move Batbooks all day long at $1 each and THEN donate them to the library.

Again, this is about as free money as I've seen on the boards. 

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4 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

I was told there would be no math. Add $600 for shipping.

Who cares what you do with the other boxes? After I cream them and pull the MCS ones, figure I've got 55 long boxes left?

They're gone in a week because around here, I can donate them to this library, or this library, or this library, or this (2 miles from my house!) library, or this one, where I've found monster Copper keys and they take literally everything, or this one, where they will UNLOAD from your truck for you while you have coffee! 

OR I can leave them in my garage until October and truck them up to Baltimore, where I can move Batbooks all day long at $1 each and THEN donate them to the library.

Again, this is about as free money as I've seen on the boards. 

I doubt the OP is going to pass the deal to you (they already said they're going to set up at a show), but I would be fascinated to know what your net results would be, accounting for everything...no fudging and not including labor costs.

:popcorn:

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Thanks for the advice! I am going to go look at it at 8am tomorrow.  A friend is going with me to help sort through the boxes. 

I will cross reference the list with MCS.

The gorilla shelves might be part of the package.

Based on the list he provided it seems very organized. The list is just titles and no numbers. He is keeping anything 1970s and earlier.

 

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The fact that there's no JLA or Titans makes this lot sweeter.  There's a metric ton of junk JLAs in that era, and I cant think of a Titans issues after 44 that cant be had for a dollar or less.  $25 a long for an orderly collection is a gimme, I'd buy it without a second thought.

I don't get the hate for Wonder Woman: volume 2 wasnt overproduced, and sells very well around here.

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4 minutes ago, Dormian said:

Thanks for the advice! I am going to go look at it at 8am tomorrow.  A friend is going with me to help sort through the boxes. 

I will cross reference the list with MCS.

The gorilla shelves might be part of the package.

Based on the list he provided it seems very organized. The list is just titles and no numbers. He is keeping anything 1970s and earlier.

 

Good luck! Keep an eye out for condition: that's what would "make or break" this collection. Even the keys, in F/VF condition, are pretty blah. 

 

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9 minutes ago, Dormian said:

Thanks for the advice! I am going to go look at it at 8am tomorrow.  A friend is going with me to help sort through the boxes. 

I will cross reference the list with MCS.

The gorilla shelves might be part of the package.

Based on the list he provided it seems very organized. The list is just titles and no numbers. He is keeping anything 1970s and earlier.

 

Definitely good luck. A quick note - don't cherry pick. Take them all or none, because your incremental time/cost will go way up if you go through them and you'll miss something. 

Edit: you're getting the shelves too? It gets better and better.

Edited by FlyingDonut
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2 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

Definitely good luck. A quick note - don't cherry pick. Take them all or none, because your incremental time/cost will go way up if you go through them and you'll miss something. 

Emphatically agreed.

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5 hours ago, KEY ISSUES Comics said:

Yeah, cherry picking is the best approach if he's letting you choose series. Why take on the burden of the 60 boxes?

Because of the current state of the market

up until a couple of years ago I would cherry pick collections because collections were plentiful and there weren't too many new hot books generated from the ones I didn't pick. 

What happened lately is the exact opposite. Great collections became very hard to come by and, I believe consequently, because so many newbs been picking up trash, a new generation of "comic book enthusiasts" (let's call them that) started to pump non key/drek that would make for great pocket change and over time a lot more than that.

A couple of months ago I picked up a collection of 20+ long ones, which was definitely cherry picked. I got it for 600. Ever since then I sold the following books from that collection:

Giant size ms marvel 1 - $50

Asm 365 x 5 - $70

Avengers 12 - $50

Thor 390 x 2 - $80

Hulk 377 x 3 - $60

Spider-Man 2099 x 10 - $50

Shadow of the bat x 10 - $50

There were a few mini keys that I sold quickly just to offset the transaction, everything else is pure profit. And that's just in 2 months. I can guarantee you this collection will generate me a few thousands just from sitting on it for the next year or 2. 

If you have the space, time and stamina, I'd say go for it. But do not offer more than 30 a box 

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I'm not sure if specifics of logistics have been mentioned, but they're worth considering:

1.  Space, do you have space to keep it before, during, and after sorting?  Is that space ground level? temperature controlled?  Can you get your car nice and close for loading unloading?

2.  Physical loading and unloading - Of course it costs time and energy and sweat to make money, but everyone has different limits physically.  This would include initial purchase, moving to storage, moving to conventions, etc.

3.  someone did mention bags and boards, that's a real thing. Same with sorting.

4. Your transportation.  How many trips, how much time and gas?  Add that to the physical loading and unloading above.

5.  Summertime weather is 'better', but also effing hotter.  Can you do your sorting (or potentially bagging and boarding) in a relatively cool room?  Plus all the loading and unloading.

6.  I get that we all love comics and its nice to make a buck working on stuff you're interested in, but this much volume....not everyone loves comics that much, especially when you start doing hourly wage labor for yourself.

 

I'm actually with flying donut, if you have experience with this size of collection and some existing infrastructure for storage and selling, its a no brainer.  But to go from buying/selling 2-5 boxes at a time to this....

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13 hours ago, shadroch said:

New Yorkers go to the beach. Jerseyites go to the Shore.

No argument there. :hi: North Florida . . . I was right, perhaps he started in Jersey?

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12 hours ago, Dormian said:

Thanks for the advice! I am going to go look at it at 8am tomorrow.  A friend is going with me to help sort through the boxes. 

I will cross reference the list with MCS.

The gorilla shelves might be part of the package.

Based on the list he provided it seems very organized. The list is just titles and no numbers. He is keeping anything 1970s and earlier.

 

As the Donut says, as close to free money as you'll ever see on these boards. :sumo: Good luck!

 

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7 hours ago, divad said:

As the Donut says, as close to free money as you'll ever see on these boards. :sumo: Good luck!

 

There is nothing "free" about transporting, pricing, shipping and selling 60 longboxes of copper junk unless you place a zero dollar value on your time and effort. 

By this logic the time I spend at my job results in a free paycheck every month. 

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18 minutes ago, october said:

There is nothing "free" about transporting, pricing, shipping and selling 60 longboxes of copper junk unless you place a zero dollar value on your time and effort. 

By this logic the time I spend at my job results in a free paycheck every month. 

They didn't say ALL of the money was free.

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1 hour ago, october said:

There is nothing "free" about transporting, pricing, shipping and selling 60 longboxes of copper junk unless you place a zero dollar value on your time and effort. 

By this logic the time I spend at my job results in a free paycheck every month. 

We can just agree to disagree. If you think quadrupling or quintupling your money on a buy like this will take a lot of effort, stay in the Golden Age end of the pool.

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