Poster Collecting: Educate Yourself

Video Transcript

"Welcome to starting a poster collection. Today we're going to talk about educating yourself about posters. After you've decided what type of poster that you're going to start collecting, the first thing that you need to do after that is you need to give yourself an education about posters in general, and about where to find the posters. And to begin with, when you're learning about posters, one other thing you can use, a vast set of tools to educate yourself on posters. The thing that I think most people should do is they should go to the library or they should go to a book, someplace where they can find a book source to educate themselves on the posters that they're collecting. A few years ago, I was given a gift on James Bond posters, which I've always been interested in, and it made a vast bit of difference between my knowledge of what actually existed versus what really existed and truly what the value of those posters where. So that way that you can look at something and you can see when you have somebody who's kind of taking you and when you have a situation where you know that you have a deal. You also need to educate yourself in legitimate versus fake posters because there's, in the hard core collectible world, there's a vast amount of reproductions and fakes and posters which just aren't authentic. And you have to know how to authenticate a poster and you can use a lot of tools as information. About a year ago I was watching the Antique's Road Show and they were having a show specifically in San Francisco. And we discussed Filmore posters earlier. And it was incredible to me the amount of fakes that were out there. And how you can tell the difference between a fake and a real poster by just a simple mark on the bottom of a poster with a circle one, means that that was the first reproduction of the poster. That doesn't mean it was original, but it was the first reproduction of the poster. And then if it has a two, it was the second reproduction. And if it has this coloring, then it was made during this year, and if it was this color, it was made that year. So there's a lot of information which is out there and you need to go out there and get the information on posters before you start collecting so that you won't get taken."