Two days ago, on his Inside Collecting blog, Dan Taylor
had a post titled Keep Your Eyes Peeled For This $700 Used Book in which he pointed out a story in Business Week magazine about Seth Klarman’s out-of-print investment guide - Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.

Here are the current Amazon listings for the book. If that makes you say “No way would anyone pay that kind of money”, then check out what people have paid for the book in the last two weeks on eBay.

This is one of those items that if the only way you can remember the title is to write it in indelible ink on your arm, you should go to Office Max and buy and indelible pen.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Another week of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge has gone by and the most recent auctions ended on Monday evening.

Of the forty-four garage sale items on eBay last week twenty-nine sold for a total of $579.76 and a sell-through rate of 66%. Seven of the items that sold were re-lists from the previous week. Several of these received multiple bids and sold for more than the opening bid when they were previously listed.

The number of garages sales this last week was down considerably from the high numbers of the previous week. All three day weekends are very slow in Grand Forks, and there were only twenty-six sales on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I actually only went to the Thursday and Friday sales because we left town for the long weekend as many others did. The result is considerably less items listed on eBay this week.

Here’s what my sales and expenses look like after the fourth week of the Challenge:

Because only a little more than a day has passed since the auctions ended, I’m sure there will be some adjustments to the PayPal fees and the profit columns next week.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Anyone who has been going to garage sales for several years knows that there come times when you just want to throw up your arms and say “the HE double hockey sticks with it. There’s never anything good at garage sales.”

Then you come across something like John from Swapatorium found last Saturday - an art deco style Sparton Bluebird radio.

This is the kind of find that takes away all thoughts for “forgetting it”, and keeps you getting up early and hitting all the sales for the next four or five years.

Congratulations, John.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Not long after I began dealing in antiques and collectibles I developed a passion for antique advertising that continues to this day. The detailed graphics and multi-colors of many pieces speak to me and my personal collecting interests have always centered around this segment of the antique arena.

Sometime in the mid 1980s someone showed me a copy of a newsletter devoted to antique advertising called The Tin Type News. The Tin Type News was published by a gentleman from Colorado affectionately called Nosmo King and each issue was filled with photos and information about fantastic old tins, tin signs, and other advertising memorabilia. After seeing that one issue, I quickly subscribed and ordered a complete set of back issues.

Fast forward to 1995 ……… We had just moved to a new home and my better half decided to have a garage sale to get rid of things we didn’t want to clutter up the new house. Some how, the boxes all my issues of The Tin Type News were packed in got shuffled into the wrong place and my mother-in-law who was “helping” at the sale, ended up selling them to someone for five dollars.

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The auctions for the garage sale purchases from week 2 of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge ended Sunday evening and the purchases from the third week are now live on eBay. Due to the upcoming three-day weekend, these auctions will end Monday evening instead of Sunday.

Of the thirteen garage sale items listed last week eight sold for a total of $135.88 and a sell-through rate of 53%, down a little from the 55% achieved the first week. As you can see by a quick look at the table below, my net profit for the week was about a close to zero as I could get without getting frostbite.

This last weekend proved to be the bust-out weekend I predicted in If It’s Thursday It Must Be Book Day In Grand Forks. After having thirty-four fresh garage sales to go to on Thursday, there were more than fifty new sales that began on Friday and another fifty plus that started on Saturday.

Here’s what my sales and expenses look like so far after three weeks.

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One of the things I bought recently to resell on eBay is a Creative Memories binder with plastic storage pages that have quite a few stickers, page borders, and templates in them. The binder has been listed on eBay for only twelve hours and I’ve already received seven requests for shipping quotes to various ZIP codes.

This is a sign that, although the new postal rates have only been in effect a week, a lot of winning bidders were surprised by the higher rates, particularly for bulky items that fall into the dreaded Priority Mail Dimensional Weight shipping category.

If you sell items it’s now pretty much mandatory that you have the actual box that you intend to ship the item in prior to listing it on eBay. Guess-timating shipping charges can now prove very expensive. Either in several dollars in shipping you end up paying for out of your own pocket, or facing the possibility of “not-so-great” feedback from a customer who ends up paying several dollars more than you quoted them.

Only one or two inches difference in the actual dimensions of the box you end up using can result in several dollars difference in what the actual shipping will be. Having to pay the difference out of your own pocket can, over time, have a dramatic effect on your bottom line.

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At one of the garage sale I was at on Saturday a woman had four, what she called, “four large antique paper dolls.”

At first glance they look like paper dolls that have been glued to a piece of cardboard and then cut. However, on closer inspection the detail along their edges is much too good to have been cut with a scissors. Particularly by a teen or pre-teen girl.

I’m pretty sure they are actually die-cut promotional advertising pieces - probably either all, or part of, a store counter display. But what product they were associated with, I have no idea.

I’m including pictures of each one. Has anyone either seen these before, or have any idea what they are from?

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Popularity: 14% [?]

There were thirty-four garage sales that started today in Grand Forks which is a large number for a Thursday. If normal ratios are the same as in past years that means there may well be fifty to sixty new sales on both Friday and Saturday.

This is unusual for this early in the season. It is normally the first or second week of June before this many are seen Thursday, Friday, and Saturday around here. We have had exceptionally nice weather the last two weeks so maybe people are getting the “bug” earlier than normal.

I started started shopping at 6:50 this morning with a sweatshirt to ward off the early morning chill, a large Midnight Roast coffee from the nearby Holiday station, and some John Fogerty CDs to keep me motivated.

With all those sales, I only purchased three things for eBay. A one-stroke painting video set, a pair of Michael Jordan sneakers, and a Fred Bear re-curve bow. All the rest of my purchases were books that are destined for Amazon.

In a comment to yesterday’s post Stephen asked if it was possible to list the titles of the books I purchased to put on Amazon. I make no promises that this will be a regular thing, but since nearly all of today’s buys are destined for Amazon, here’s a list of the titles that I purchased and their authors:

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The auctions for the first week’s purchases of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge ended Sunday evening and the purchases from the second week are now live on eBay.

Only fifteen of the twenty-seven items listed sold for a somewhat disappointing 55% sell-through rate. The majority of those that did not sell will be re-listed next week and I expect that at least a half dozen of them will sell the second time around.

I’m estimating that I’ll need an overall sell-through rate of between 75% and 80% in order to offset the healthy mileage expenses this Challenge will incur. If that doesn’t happen, it will require two or three very big winners at sometime through the five months.

The Challenge is just beginning though and there are still plenty of weeks to go.

Here’s what things look like after the first week’s auctions.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

A little more than two months ago in Selling Vintage Magazine Articles On eBay I took a look at two sellers who were selling articles, advertisements, and photos taken from vintage magazines as individual items in their eBay stores.

After looking at the business model these two sellers were using, I decided to test it for a few months and see how things went. I started by listing a total of 49 articles and full page ads. These came from two items I had whose condition was such they weren’t sellable. A November 1896 issue of Metropolitan magazine and a six bound issues of Harper’s Monthly magazine from 1873 and 1874.

Although I have picked up several more magazines as sources for additional listings, due to various circumstances I haven’t had the time to list any additional articles or ads.

To date, without any promotion, twelve of the articles and ads have sold. The most recent was the Colt pistol advertisement shown above that sold for $12.99. Prices for the other items sold have ranged from $9.99 to $24.99 with most of them being in the lower end of that range.

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Popularity: 17% [?]