Collector's item

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A collector's item is an object or item of any kind that has become valuable -- often unexpectedly. Over the years, a large number of incidents have resulted in certain objects related to those incidents becoming very desirable and valuable. The objects, which may have been common everyday items when they were originally produced, have since gone on to become rare and valuable, and have sometimes been sold to collectors for large sums of money.

The desirability of a collector's item separates it from the broader field of collectible items in general. For example, stamps are collectible items, and stamp collecting is a popular hobby. But certain stamps are far more valuable than others, and these rare and valuable stamps are usually described as collector's items.

Some examples of collector's items are

• Comic books produced during the golden age of comic books
• Newspapers with headlines related to historic events, such as "Dewey Defeats Truman" (see United States presidential election, 1948 and Chicago Tribune)
• the first issue of Playboy magazine, with Marilyn Monroe as centerfold
• Cap'n Crunch toy whistles. (These have been used by phone phreaks to manipulate phone-system switching computers.)
• The U.S. 1955 doubled die cent
• The Inverted Jenny postage stamp
• The first edition of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune (In 1990, a good copy was offered for $800 in a science-fiction convention dealers' room, and not at auction. It would be somewhat more valuable now.)
• original Fillmore posters (These were posted around San Francisco on walls and kiosks and were given out at the door to people leaving concerts. One Stanford student who was a regular at Fillmore concerts used to wallpaper his room with numerous identical posters, changing them every few months. These posters were only made once and were expendable. Some people who collected them, saved them for years, and sold them optimally have gotten hundreds of dollars per poster.
• An alpha edition Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering card
• vintage motor vehicles
• The Mickey Mantle baseball card
• The Apple III computer
• The Apple Lisa computer

Various manufacturers have occasionally attempted to deliberately create a collector's market for their products, in the hope that they will increase in value and become true collector's items (and thus make a profit for the manufacturer). A few of these attempts to create collector's items have been successful, but most "collector's items" created to artificially inflate the collector's market have ended up as worthless or near-worthless in value.

Author Ken W. Purdy, who mostly writes about classic cars, wrote a short story entitled the Antine Bay Magenta, about two fanatical stamp collectors who each possess one example of the world's rarest stamp. Each plots and schemes to beg, borrow, or steal the other's stamp. When one collector finally has both Antine Bay Magenta stamps, he burns one of them, satisfied that he now has the only one in existence.

This story was published in Playboy magazine, decades ago, but Playboy doesn't publish an index of its fiction, although it does sell

• back issues (for $10-200, if one already knows which one to buy)
• collections of its better-known short stories and articles, and interviews for $20-25 * T-shirts emblazoned "I read the Articles", for $15
• reprints of pictorials (for $10-100)
• lingerie
• sleepwear for men and women
• costumes
• calendars
• soft-core videos
• hard-core videos, through a "plausibly-deniable" subsidiary

and innumerable items it imagines oeople might want