[78-L] "Value" of 78s

[Steven C. Barr]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Taylor Bowie" <bowiebks at isomedia.com>
> Good question,  Julian.  My view of "crap" is material where the supply
> nearly always exceeds the demand...and of course there are plenty of good
> and enjoyable records which don't fetch any money.
> I'm not sure what the general perception is about a "high price"  but 
> there
> are plenty of dance band items for which I've paid a lot of money on 
> actual
> auctions,  such as Nauck and some of the better eBay sellers.  By "lot of
> money" I mean $35 or more...sometimes over a hundred and once in a great
> while over two hundred.  I wish they had been cheaper but I wasn't about 
> to
> let some of them go,  since I'd not come across a chance to buy them in
> forty years of collecting.
> This does not explain the occasional bursts of insanity I've seen where
> fairly common 24000 Victor dance bands were fetching 200 -  300 each for 
> no
> apparent reason.
>
> So there is a lot of room between "78s are mostly worth a buck each" and
> what someone might pay for a pristine Oliver Okeh.
>
Interesting! The most I EVER paid for a 78 was $21...for a 1931? Brunswick
12" "All-Star" record, which included the Boswell Sisters! Also, note that
prices from eWotsit are dubious for a couple of reasons! First, an 
unrealistic
price can result when two bidders have personal reasons for wanting that
particular 78 ("It was my late mother's favourite record"...?!) and 
effectively
unlimited supplies of money! Second, in ANY sort of auction (40 years
ago, I attended innumerable farm auctions in central Illinois...!) there
emerges the "dominance hierarchy" built into Homo Sapiens! Thus, it
becomes a battle between two usually-male egos...translated as "NOT
winning this means I am weaker than him...and thus his inferior!"

I was known among local auctioneers as "the guy who will ALWAYS
bid a quarter (or a dime, if possible) for ANY box of "junk!" They
used to prepare for auctions by dumping all the accumulated odds
and ends in kitchen (usw.) drawers into one box...which I almost
ALWAYS bid on (see above) and usually won!

My 78-related auction story...:

Back around late 1973, I was working for a chap who had a
"flea market" stall selling "antique" radios...as his repairman...!
He bought c. 5000 78's at an auction in Bloomington, Ill's. He
had NO idea which ones might be valuable...so he asked me
to look through the discs and pull out stuff like "Uncle Josh"
records, for which his customers were asking. The deal was
that I could take out and keep any discs I wanted! I took
around 5-600 78's...including BOTH of the "Lang-Venuti
All-Star" Melotones. That basically started me as a 78
collector...now, 36-7 years have passed, and I STILL
collect the dommed things!

Steven C. Barr