Poster Collecting: Finding Items

Video Transcript

"Welcome to starting a poster collection. Today we're going to talk about the difficulties of locating your item. There is a multitude of places that sell, sell and buy posters. And first, what I use is, I look locally. I will, if I'm looking for a music poster, I will check out the local music places. If I'm looking for movie posters, I may either find a local shop which has movie posters, or I can contact the movie theater. Especially if it's a movie which was released recently. If you're looking for something which is like an art poster or something which is architecture, I usually check out museums which is a very odd place to look. But amazingly enough, they have a lot of posters and they're usually very, very good. Next, if you can't find your item there, you can move to the internet. The two big places are E-Bay and Amazon. There's a lot more to choose from on E-Bay. You may pay an astronomical price for a poster. I've seen an AC/DC tour poster from the seventies go for over eight thousand dollars on E-Bay. On Amazon, it's a lot easier because it's much more defined. Somebody tells you, "I want ten bucks for this poster" You pay ten bucks, you get your poster. On your really, really hard to find collectibles though, I have a lot of skepticism when using E-Bay or Amazon. For that matter, to give you an example, they give, someplace will give you a Certificate of Authenticity. Well the Certificate of Authenticity is just basically a sheet of paper which says that I say that it's real. Well how do I know that it's real? A Certificate of Authenticity doesn't really do anything unless you have a true expert behind it who's giving a Certificate of Authenticity. Then it's worth something. So when you're really going for hard core collectibles or items that are worth a lot of money, you then move to auction houses. And you'll find that there are some local auction houses probably where you are, but the two largest that I can think of in the world are Sothebys and Christies. And so when you're looking to really add to your collection and truly make your collection complete, you really have to use Sothebys and Christies to move you to the next level, because they come up with items that no other place will."