The auction lot of postcards looked great during the preview session. There were a few local cards, holidays, military and some real photo postcards that were looking for a new home in somebody’s collection. The cards were displayed in a binder filled with clear archival pages. Each page contained only four cards, so you could take a quick look at the back to see if the card was postally used or not. If it was used, a quick glance over to the upper right corner revealed several DPO (Discontinued Post Offices) cancels. A number of the cards had prices written in pencil from several dealers. It looked like a great lot, and I decided to place a bid.
I decided upon my bid pain threshold of what I would be willing to pay for the lot. I jumped into the bidding early with an opening bid of $10.00 for the 200+ vintage postcards. There were blissful thoughts and hopes running through my head that no one else was interested in an auction lot of old postcards at this Lancaster County auction house. BOOM! The battle was on. It was a bloody fight against several other bidders, including some “so-called friends” from the LCPC. When the gavel sounded, I was the winner of this postcard lot. et. As Jim McKay used to say during the opening segment of ABC’s Wide World of Sports years ago “The Thrill of Victory . . .”
That evening, I took my newly purchased treasure home to reap the spoils of the battle. I planned to keep a few postcards for my collection and prepare the rest for my resale sales inventory. When tearing down any postcard collection, I have this personal sorting system:
1. Postcards for my collection - Usually about 5 out of 100 cards.
2. Postcards for the trash can - About 3 to 10 cards per 100 depending on a number of condition factors. There is no sense in my mind to corrupt my inventory with severely damaged cards that 99.9% of my customers would never consider adding to their collections. All of us have looked through too many boxes of damaged cards.
3. Postcards for my 25¢ box. Many of the cards in this lot that were destined for this box had higher prices written in pencil on them, but I was not going to take the time to erase the former dealer prices off the backs of these postcards.
4. Postcards for my regular resale inventory. The non-priced cards were quickly priced, placed in archival sleeves and sorted into their proper category. When I started on the pile of previously priced cards from assorted dealers, the rest of Jim McKay’s famous words began to echo in my head. “. . . and the Agony of Defeat”. Just like Slovenian ski jumper Vinko Bogataj, my profit from this purchase was going to come down real hard in the final landing.
Little did I know that many of the priced cards (and ALWAYS the best cards) were etched in pencil with the delicate hand of Soviet Olympic weightlifter Vasili Alexeyev. When I started erasing the prices off the back of these cards, they revealed grooved trenches that would have hidden most WWI soldiers at the Somme Battlefield. The now erased and exposed marks of $1.00 on dealer priced cards that I was going to sell for $5.00 and up were impossible to cover up with a new price. Valuable DPO postmarks and cancels were rendered worthless with a few hard strokes of a pencil by a previous dealer. Caveat Emptor. In a future article, I will discuss proper writing pencils and types of erasers to use or not to use on postcards. Until then K.I.S.S. – Keep It Soft Stupid.
