eMoviePoster.com

The movie poster collecting hobby really "took off" in the 1970s. Yes, there were some collectors before that, but it was in the 1970s that all sorts of "modern" collecting hobbies (baseball cards, comic books, science fiction books and magazines, etc), and collecting movie posters was no exception. But the big difference with movie posters (as compared to those other hobbies) is that hardly anyone ever had access to movie posters in their daily life, unless they had a connection to a movie theater, and even then, movie posters were hard to acquire.

This has been written about extensively by me (and others) elsewhere, so I won't rehash it here, but this far greater rarity of movie posters kept the hobby far smaller than those other hobbies. I regularly went to collectible shows from 1967 to 1976, and there would only be a few dealers with movie posters, compared to hundreds of dealers with other types of collectibles.

When I became a full-time movie poster dealer in 1989, I found that there were only around 2,000 movie poster collectors! But then in the late 1990s the Internet both exposed the entire world to movie posters, and it also allowed movie poster collectors the world over to "find" each other. I estimate there are currently around 15,000 "serious" movie poster collectors, and around 50,000 more "casual" ones!

But what about those couple of thousand collectors who started collecting in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s? Of course, some of them are no longer with us, but the ones who are are mostly in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. And while some of them sold their collections along the way, there are many others who still have much or most or ALL of what they bought over the years, and now they have to decide what to do with it.

Their first thought is always to give it to their children, but it is REALLY rare that their children share their collecting joy, and most often it would be a giant burden put on those children, for they most often have no idea of values, or of who they can trust to deal with to sell the collection (and there are many, many "horror" stories of heirs getting fleeced when selling their parent's collection, because the parent did not leave any clear instructions).

Their second thought is to leave their entire collection to a museum, but most often when this happens, the collections sits in a corner of a basement or warehouse (and there are many cases of employees of museums pilfering the items, which is just so sad). Their third thought is to sell their entire collection to a collector who can have a "ready made" collection, but that goes contrary to the idea of collecting! The fun of collecting is assembling a collection yourself, and individual collectors never buy whole collections in this way.

So then the collectors thinking of disposing of their decades long collection consider selling everything to a dealer. But dealers will only offer a fraction of a collection's value for it, with good reason. If it is filled with great items, they might offer 50% of the retail, hoping to double their money over the next year or two as they dispose of it item by item.

But if it is a typical collection, with some "better" items, some "medium value" items, and lots of "lower value items", then the dealer will likely only offer 10% or 15% of the collection's retail value! Why? Because it will likely take YEARS, and lots of work to sell the items, and they want to be compensated for all the time their money is tied up, the amount of work they did, and the storage space needed.

Since many collectors want to receive more than this, they then look towards auctions. Until 1998 or so, the only auctions there were (including mine!) only wanted "better" items, usually ones with values in the hundreds of dollars. But then eBay came along, and finally collectors had a way to sell every item they had, one by one.

But over time, some problems with this "self-selling" became evident. eBay started charging higher and higher fees, and micro-managing their sellers in a million ways. The site attracted sellers of fakes, which made buyers less willing to bid. And dishonest buyers found they could take advantage of loopholes that let them cheat honest sellers.

But worst of all, selling on eBay is like having a part-time or full-time job! You need lots of equipment (computer, camera, scanner, shipping supplies, etc) and each transaction eats up lots of your time, and now the buyers expect you to ship everything immediately. It is no fun at all to be an eBay seller, and your items get lost amid a sea of repros, fakes, and ridiculously overpriced "Buy It Now" items, so sales at a good price are few and far between.

AND THAT IS WHERE EMOVIEPOSTER.COM COMES IN! As over TWO THOUSAND collectors who have consigned to us have discovered, we do ALL the work for them! They ship or deliver their items to us and we do all the rest. And on average we receive around one third of the selling prices received, FAR less than any dealer or auction, and we get the items sold far faster than they ever could (and of course they don't want the low priced items that we WILL take).

BUT CONSIDER THAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FULL TIME FOR 27 YEARS, AND THERE IS NO TELLING HOW MUCH LONGER WE WILL DO SO! My intention is to keep the business going exactly has it has been at least through June of 2020 (two and a half years from now), but of course no one can predict exactly what the future holds, so there is no guarantee of that happening! And what will be a longtime collector's other option on selling a large collection if eMoviePoster.com is no longer available?

If you are a very long time collector (one who started collecting in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s), I want you to consider this:
    Right now, you have a way to sell your entire collection where you do NO work at all (other than getting it to us)
    Right now, you have a way to sell your entire collection when there are a LOT of bidders paying high prices for quality items
    Right now, you have a way to sell your entire collection through the most trusted auction house there is!

And it is these above reasons why so many of the old-time collectors have been saying "I see a trip to West Plains in my near future"! People keep asking us, "Where do you get so many items that you can keep running 3,000 auctions a week?" and the answer is that most of it has come from the many old-time collectors who have driven their collections here over the past few years. As long as there is a steady stream of additional collectors doing the same, we will continue running 3,000 auctions a week!