Registered: 03/23/05
Posts: 19264
Loc: Alberta Canada
Calgary was a massive, hectic, crowded show and I'm still feeling dazed and scattered. Please be patient as I try to order my thoughts and get this thread rolling.
Back story. Kimik, Piper, Artboy99, 500club and myself met on the boards a few years ago and decided to meet in person. After a few beer and wings outings we decided to go to a local show and sell our under copies and odds and ends. We did well enough to go to another show and another show and now we have 4 years of shows, 4 or 5 shows a year, under our belts.
It is fun to sell books and use that money to buy keepers for our collections but I certainly see myself as an advocate for collectors and I want to sell the right book, graded accurately, to the right guy for a fair price. I believe the other guys feel the same way.
Registered: 03/23/05
Posts: 19264
Loc: Alberta Canada
Show opened Friday afternoon at 3 pm. Kimik had to pass on the show at the last minute due to family commitments. Artboy99 and I drove 200 miles south from Edmonton and 500club drove 125 miles south from Lacombe for the show.
Artboy and I arrived around noon. 500club had already setup our wall rack and hauled his books in and was probably out for lunch. The show is pretty well organized and unloading was easy. Before we even had our cart stopped in front our booth Harley and a few other dealers were ripping the tops off our boxes and pulling books out. I was a bit put off as I don't think they even asked if they could look, they just swarmed us. Harley has a great eye, naturally, and managed to pull many good books in short order but I was surprised to see him pull a super obscure Canadian White out of my odds and ends GA short box. I think most pros would have missed it in a quick scan.
I gave Harley a price, he tried to bump me down and I flat out told him I was a collector who paid retail and I couldn't sell sell keys and demand books for less. He took them all and I'm sure they are all on his wall at 30 to 40 percent over GPA.
The dealers across from us were from Winnipeg and buying mostly for their personal collections. They paid fairly and took some great books like GIC87 and Four Color 203 in high grade. Throughout the show they came back to our booth and bought more quality GA and 50s books and they were a pleasure to meet.
Registered: 03/23/05
Posts: 19264
Loc: Alberta Canada
Once the vultures had circled and picked us clean I noticed that the booth behind us stuck out into the aisle about 3 feet more than us. I knew the advance sales for this show were huge and I knew at least 20 friends making the 200 mile drive from Edmonton to Calgary, most of which had never been to a Comic Con, and I knew that as the crowds walked down the aisle they would bunch up in front our booth and become a problem. We discussed asking the organizers if we could move our table out and Harley told us to just do it and the worse thing that would happen would be being told to move it back. We did and it gave us an extra 3 or 4 feet to move around in our booth. Harley then said that we could probably fit a 4 ft table at the front of our expanded booth and he had seen some 4 ft tables in the back. A few minutes later Harley came back dragging the table. This isn't his first rodeo.
Registered: 03/23/05
Posts: 19264
Loc: Alberta Canada
Now our booth had a 12 ft front table and a 8 foot side table. We moved the tables a bit further out to give us an entrance at the side and we started putting our books out. 1/2 way into setup the organizers announced that the doors were opening for the VIP ticket sales. :curses: We hustled to get our box tops off and our display wall populated. Next came the hoards of people.
Hey Mike
