eMoviePoster.com

I have spent 58 years collecting and buying and selling all sorts of collectibles (I started collecting comics when I was ten, and started selling at 15, and became a full-time dealer at 16!), and I can categorically state that the above is true!

WHY is this? It is because of the way in which vintage movie posters, lobby cards, and stills are found. Until 1980 or so, the vast majority of theaters that received movie paper used it and then either sent it on to the next theater or returned it to the poster exchange to be sent to another theater. They almost never sold the posters to collectors or fans of the movie, which accounts for why they are FAR more rare than items in other hobbies, like Baseball cards, stamps, comics, etc, which WERE sold to the public (by the thousands or millions).

If the above is true, then how are there almost ANY surviving "older" movie posters (from before the 1970s), and why do you see dozens of examples of several older posters? Because the poster exchanges, which distributed the movie paper to theaters, originally had hundreds of every item, and in some cases, they only distributed a portion of their supply, and that often left dozens of an item on their shelves, and in the 1960s, when collectors started buying directly from these, those unused multiple examples entered the hobby.

So on most pre-1970 titles, you have some titles where there were none (or virtually none) left in exchanges and these are quite rare titles, and then you have other titles where there were lots of each size left in exchanges, and those titles are "common" (but bear in mind that in movie paper collecting, 100 examples of an item in current circulation is considered "common", while in any other hobby that would be considered super scarce!). Then there are also many titles where the movie paper was very poorly distributed from the start (primarily those from before the late 1930s), and on those titles it can be incredibly hard to locate even a single poster or lobby card!

Once a collector has been in the hobby for a few years, they start to be able to easily distinguish between the titles you "see all the time" and the "ones you never see", and they soon learn they will have to pay a HIGH premium to acquire items that fall in the second group, because they may be competing against collectors who have been looking for that title (without success) for many years!

A great help in discerning rarity is our Auction History Database at http://www.emovieposter.com/agallery/archive.html. There you will find a searchable history of our past sales including most of the images from those sales! There are currently a hard-to-believe 1,794,423 results there and we add each new set of auctions as they finish, but unlike EVERY other online database, we ONLY include items that actually sold (if an item is not paid for, we remove that result). So you KNOW for sure that every item actually sold for the listed price, on that date, and in a 100% cash sale! Thousands of collectors rely on this Auction History Database on a regular basis, and you should too!

But bear in mind that "rarity" does not ALWAYS translate to "expensive" and that "common" does not ALWAYS translate to "cheap"! We often turn up lobby cards or stills from titles where NOTHING has ever surfaced before, and sometimes these sell for just a few dollars. And there are many popular titles where the posters are constantly at auction, and they still command a healthy price, because there are LOTS of collectors who want to own them.

But for the most part, if you have two somewhat similar items from two different movies from around the same time, and one is "scarce" and the other is "common", then the scarce one will cost at least several times more than the common one. And both of them will be many times more rare than other collectibles made around the same time, for the above reasons. If the movie poster collecting hobby ever grows substantially, you will almost surely see this rarity difference play a very big role in the pricing of posters!

This is why we try to very hard to note in our auctions when we are auctioning an item for the very first time, or only the second time. And sometimes we will note that ALL movie paper is very rare on a specific title, not just the size we are currently auctioning. If WE have never auctioned something vintage after over 1.7 MILLION auctions, you know it is likely extremely rare!