Best Of

I agree with Wil and yes, the thread was about what members future plans are when the time comes to move their collections on.

 Lawrence, I think we are most certainly preserving film history. When I have large quantities of posters for individual titles that no one wants, it makes sense to reduce the quantity. It still leaves me with a considerable amount of posters for various titles and has absolutely no effect on film history. I have boxes of unsaleable posters in very poor condition that I keep purely because they are rare. I have over 50,000 images of posters on my website alone and leave them on the site even when they are sold so others can view them. It costs a considerable amount of money to maintain a large website and the more pages and images you have, the more it costs. Many people lift images from my site and load them on to social media. Unfortunately, some of the institutions in Australia that have large collections do not display images. Much of their collections are kept in storage indefinitely due to limited resources and no one ever gets to see them.

 Getting back to the main theme of the thread, another problem for people with large collections in Australia is that the smaller auction venues are generally unlikely to achieve reasonable returns. Some of the venues are incredibly slack and just seem to want to turn stock over at any price without taking care with poor quality photos and inaccurate descriptions. They are good places to pick up bargains but I wouldn't risk selling anything through any of them.

 That leads to very few options for Australian collectors who want to sell their collections.

Included above in the wonderful selection of extremely rare silent films poster three sheets and six sheets that Wil had kindly included earlier.  Amongst the images is the 1933 sound film poster of The Vampire Bat.

I really like the artwork on this poster and as the image is very small I have included below another very rare larger poster image of the same designed poster courtesy of Bruce for all to admire.

This one is also rare. Bruce has never auctioned it and I have only ever had one other copy.

Actually eBay has been silent on the tariffs but I registered separately with zonos and it works well.

Looks like I did leave lots of treasures for you in NZ!

Here is one I havent had before

Some lovely silents there.

Congrats John. Hopefully there are some pre-1945 gems in there somewhere! 

Like you, I've also scaled back on purchasing every collection offered my way and unless it has some early/silent content for keeps, I tend to pass these days. Including a couple of pallets worth I've been toying with committing to these last few weeks. Sadly at least 75% would end up being dumped (tat titles or nice but trashed and not worth the time/effort trying to shift). 

My recent house move to the far South prompted me to take a far more brutal approach to overflow storage, in terms of continually moving boxes from A to B that I never had the heart to dump. So multiple car loads and wheelie bins later, I ended up reducing my move load by 47 boxes. A time consuming task (everything was torn up then sealed in old file boxes), however it was certainly long overdue.




Hopefully, if all goes to plan, within 2 to 3 years I will be retired for good. So aside from continuing my 1910s to 40s and early British war film collecting (which will hopefully go to a museum when I'm 6ft under), my selling days will be over.

As you're aware from our last chat, I now have a number of physical stores (antique/collectables etc) selling some of my mass duplicated daybills on my behalf. On average they keep no more than 20% for themselves which is certainly fine by me. Especially as they tend to inflate what I'd consider a fair 'retail' value. I know you said that there weren't that many local to you, so perhaps reach out to other cities? I have satellite stock in both Islands and it works pretty well, just so long as you ship them a good supply every quarter.

It certainly saves scanning hundreds, if not thousands of lobby cards!





I've also donated a number of pieces to a few arthouse cinemas in both Islands, so could well see a few more instances of that happening in the future as I downscale home poster display space and finally let my wife put up some non-movie themed artwork 😀.





My silent/talkie collection exhibition starts it's tour in Arrowtown late 2027, with the hope to see it carried on by a number of the larger national museums. So hopefully it gains sufficient momentum to keep going for some time, which will give me more incentive to keep adding to it in my retirement.

A sample of some of my currently backed 3 & 6 sheets below, with a hell of a lot more to have backed this coming year. 



As with the rest. Well a portion will go to the usual US auction houses (I certainly prefer them over the UK offerings) and my remaining store stock, well with Bruce (understandably so) no longer accepting truck loads of complete collections/dealer stock some years ago, it will likely get palmed out to my physical store 3rd parties or wholesaled locally.