eMoviePoster.com

When I (Bruce) first started weekly auctions at eMoviePoster.com in 1999, they originally solely consisted of U.S. movie posters and lobby cards. At that time, I primarily only collected U.S. movie paper, because that is what I had grown up looking at outside theaters.

But our auctions quickly "took off" and our customer base doubled from 2,000 to 4,000, and I saw how many of those new customers were from outside the U.S. (thanks to the power of the internet), I knew we had to also offer international posters, and that meant I (and my employees) had to take a "crash course" in non-U.S. posters, and not only did we learn about posters from just about every country that ever made them, but we also learned to have a deep appreciation of them, and fully realize that, in an awful lot of cases, they are far superior to U.S. posters from the same titles. And over time, we came to auction around as many non-U.S. posters as U.S. ones!

Next came vintage 8x10 stills. For many years I resisted auctioning them, because I could not absolutely always tell an original from a re-release, repro, or restrike. But when I came to realize that NO ONE in the world absolutely knows on every still, I immersed myself in learning everything I could about them, and now I follow a simple rule: If I am not certain whether a still is original or a re-release, repro, or restrike, I either auction it with that disclaimer, or return it to the consignor. We have kept expanding our auctions of stills until we now well over 100,000 of them a year!

Next was personally autographed items (mostly movie related, but some non-movie as well). We were consigned some large collections, and we soon found out that there are a MASSIVE number of fakes out there, and that there are also a ton of "bad" authentication services as well, and that a Certificate of Authenticity is sometimes worthless. But we plunged ahead, and found that people really like our way of auctioning signed items (we tell them everything we know about how the autographs were obtained, and we reject any that don't seem right to us, and if experts email us while auctions are on, we end the auctions of doubtful autographs). We keep increasing the frequency of our "signed" auctions, and are now doing them every two months!

Next was NON-movie posters. I had always seen beautiful travel and advertising posters on the walls of restaurants (and in fancy galleries), but I never auctioned them until some people starting begging me to also auction them, and I found they are really similar to movie posters, and after a lot of work and research we now auction lots and lot of non-movie posters of all kinds (and also all sorts of "non-traditional" movie posters, like Mondo limited edition prints), and those are among our most popular auctions, and more and more of these sorts of posters have been included in our major auctions as well.

Recently we have been experimenting more and more with books, magazines, pressbooks, and other "non-poster" movie collectibles, and we have even dabbled in some non-movie items like comic books and stamps. All of this goes to show you that we are FAR more than just "movie posters" in our auctions (and it makes us wish we had started with a less restrictive sounding name than "eMoviePoster.com" when we first started out on the internet in 1999)!