There’s a sucker born ever minute, and Bob sells far fewer than a record a minute. I think that’s the real answer.

Question: Is there a parallel jazz collector universe that we don’t know about where the generally accepted guidelines of collecting don’t apply? Bizzarrojazzcollector.com?

First, the easy bit: yes, Art, I have sometimes tried to pay more for a record because it was under-priced. Two circumstances in which that has happened: a). when it’s a close friend or relative who I want to do right by; b). a local friendly real-world bricks-and-mortar store that I want to stay in business. Sure, I could take the short term win but we have to look to the longer term too – if we all exploit under-pricing by these outlets then they’ll wither and die which will restrict our future collecting opportunities.

Now on to Bob D…

I’g going to choose my words with care and recall what our grannies said about if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything. Then I’m going to slightly ignore that advice 🙂

This guys cherry picks when it comes to his definition of what’s an “original” pressing. And he always cherry picks on the side that is most advantageous to him. After watching many of his auctions over the years (including some records I would very much like to add to my collection like the batch of Strata-Easts he recently had for sale) I’ve concluded that he does not reach a high enough standard of trustworthiness for me to do business with him.

I empathise with the caveat emptor view expressed by several other commenters here that people ought to due their due diligence research first before paying inappropriately high prices. However, those prices don’t just sting those buyers – they hurt us all because they tend to artificially inflate future prices. Both eBay bidders and sellers look at historical prices and set their expectations on what they see but they don’t necessarily look closely enough to spot that many top-dollar prices are associated with a particular seller.

That said, I don’t feel sorry for the buyers either. When you’re ready to drop $2k on a record, you better do your homework before setting that snipe. It’s almost like some of these buyers are asking for it.