Scarce, Rare, and of Rising Value

Dave, hunting through postcards.

The “bug” for collecting is easy to catch. Dave caught it, years before I got exposed to it. The family I grew up in, with a passel of kids and only one income (Dad’s), never bought things as investments, but instead to use or, very rarely, to enjoy looking at (which was another kind of using). Sell it again later? Not something we did, except that we hoped the (used when we bought it) car still had a bit of trade-in value when it was time to buy another.

Dave’s family didn’t invest in objects for their rising value, either. His grandfather and dad, it turned out, bought stocks, but in the sense of a savings account with better interest on it.

So where did Dave get exposed? Watching an episode of “Antiques Road Show” last week suggested possibilities: I watched a man who’d spent $5 on a poster, because he liked it, learn that it would now be “valued at auction” at about $120 — he was tickled pink (as my mother would say). A well-groomed woman with a modest chuckle admitted she’d gone on instinct to pay $500 for a Bakelite (special plastic) bracelet, and discover from the auction assessors that they’d price it at far more. A grandmother displaying family memorabilia learned that “at auction” she could expect $12,000 for her Western roots collection.

Dave began simply as a motivated collector, the way he described in his “oral history,”…