Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Scavenge/Sale of the Week › Scavenge of the week October 13-19, 2024
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10/21/2024 at 1:03 am #104078
I accumulated a huge order from one of my favorite consignment sellers last week, and it contained a mix of all the kinds of sports and non sports cards I love to sell — and my favorite purchase of the year!
First, the card side of things since that’s what pays my bills. I’ve done well with WNBA cards this year and this Arike Ogunbowale MVP jungle parallel #23/25 will be an easy $10 to $20 flip. Good thing there were auctions for two copies of this card, #23/25 and #24/25, and I won both of them. I shelled out $17.50 for this Caitlin Clark box set floating hearts parallel #/199, which is near comps, but I’m all-in on Caitlin cards from now until the start of next season.
Non-sports tobacco cards have been another new and profitable niche for me this year. I love when I can buy a pile of them from the same set for a few bucks each. These 1889 N225 Historic Dances cards cost me less than $2 each and they are in really nice shape for their age, especially the color and corners. I should net $100 profit on the lot, and I picked up a few more lots like this in the order, so I should make my money back just on 19th century cards. If the old tobacco cards don’t get me in the black, these 1943 Adventures of Smilin Jack cards sure will. I paid $25 for the whole lot, and they will cost me another $35 or so in consignment fees. But I should get $2 to $5 for each card. It’s a slow nickel. Often these sets will take a year or more to sell piece by piece. But the beauty of selling on consignment is that occasionally I will get a huge order of 20+ cards from a set collector who came across my port and kept on adding to their cart.
A little outside my usual comfort zone, but I won a few authenticated signed 1970s TV contracts in the $20 range, with this Tex Williams from 1948 looking like the most valuable one right now. No different from selling photos or memorabilia, and I will love to see how quickly these items sell.
Buying all of this stuff was a lot of fun, but my favorite scavenge by far were these love letters written and signed by Hall of Fame first baseman Ralph Kiner who played in the 1950s and died in 2014. I won a handful of his love letters all for less than $10 each which feels like an extreme bargain for something so unique and personal. I’ve got to do some research and thinking on how to best list them, but I feel like these letters will easily go for $50 each to the right buyer.
What did you find this week?
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10/21/2024 at 3:48 am #104079
Those love letters just reminded me I must have a pile of empty envelopes from a Royal Air Force camp in Rhodesia somewhere. I guess Ralph Kiner never got divorced then, unlike my parents 🙂
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10/25/2024 at 4:44 pm #104108
Four marriages for Ralph! According to Wikipedia, he was also linked to high profile romances with Ava Gardner, Liz Taylor and Janet Leigh. Now those are the love letters I want to read!
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10/26/2024 at 11:46 am #104116
“one of baseball’s genuine and most charming gentlemen.”
That’s four strikes against me, then. Explains things…
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10/21/2024 at 12:40 pm #104084
I made it out to one of our larger thrift stores last week. Didn’t buy much but I was surprised that they already started trickling out their saved up Christmas. Not listed yet but comps look good for this. I had to pay up a bit at $14
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10/28/2024 at 12:31 am #104118
Bought a crate of disassembled clarinets plus a broken piston trumpet for £30 on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. It was dark, and damp.
Note to self: under no circumstances ever buy a clarinet again.
I’ve got nine clarinet bells plus a broken bell, so I guess there must be nine or ten in the pile. The bells would make nice lampshades for desk lamps, so there is that.
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