A Misadventure in Jazz Collecting, Part 5
Five hundred thousand. Dollars. Half a million. That’s what Debby told me her collection was worth. After all the research she’d done, the piles she had pulled together, the broken dining room table, the $250 Woody Hermans and Benny Goodmans, the Japanese reissues and Blue Note originals, after all of that, the grand total was $500,000. And that’s not all. She’d had several subsequent conversations with the Big Shot Record Dealer From Chicago, who shall henceforth be known here as the BSRD from Chicago. He told her that he would pay her half of the retail value for her records.
I tried not to choke. I tried to remain calm and cool as I explained to her, for at least the tenth time, how things actually work in the real world. That what she thought the retail value of her collection was worth, would not be the same as what the BSRD from Chicago would think it was worth. That dealers are in business to make money and they need margin, they need to account for their time, they need to clean the records, put them on eBay, pay the fees, deal with fickle buyers who return items for no reason at all. That any buyer would have to transport the records, ship them, rent a truck to haul them, who knows. Read more