Xena Collecting and Price

Jane Frank writes a great art collecting column in the ezine Estronomicon. Jane's collumn, "The Artful Collector" features a lot of collecting wisdom from 40 years of personal experience collecting SF and Fantasy original art. Jane and Howard Frank have THE PREMIERE SF/F art collection anywhere and they are also a lot of fun to talk to, as I've found out meeting up with them at different WorldCons. Jane's column, while written about collecting original art, is relevant to the serious Xena collector.

In an early column, Jane adds this quote:

"We are three-quarters obsessive, two-fifths eccentric, and one-third witless." (As William Walden observed in "The Lowdown,” Antiques and Collecting Magazine, December 2002). This applies to the serious Xena collector as well, though I might tweak the fractions for the three qualities mentioned. Collecting, by it's very nature, is an obsessive activity, and every collector exhibits a certain level of obsessiveness when it comes to seeking a particular item for their collection.

One of the biggest issues that a Xena collector has to navigate is the question of price: How much do you pay for an item? As so many wise collectors know, value floats. The value of an item at any given time is dependent on "time, place, and the individuals involved" (“Rinker on Collectibles” in Antiques & Collecting Magazine (“The Selling Price” February, 2002) again quoted by Jane. The ultimate price for any item is the one you and the seller have agreed upon. If the seller isn't desperate to sell, and the buyer isn't desperate to buy, you might come close to an actual Fair Market Price.

In the Xenaverse, we would need to add an additional theorem: prices obtained at charity auctions will never be Fair Market, but will always be inflated. This is how it should be at charity auctions. The driving force is the interest in participating in "The Greater Good." This is a stronger driving force than the tax-deductible incentive for charity donations -- I say this because most people participating in charity auctions are not in the position to take advantage of that particular tax strategy. Xena fans are intrinsically charitable; if you get 5 Xena fans together in one place, one of them will invariably ask, "when's the charity auction?".

An important point to reiterate is that CHARITY AUCTION PRICES ARE NOT FAIR MARKET VALUE. Remember, not only are charity auction results are inflated, they are intended to be so, to the benefit of the charity.

The priciest items to collect in the Xenaverse today are original art, original costumes, and original props. Reproductions of props and costumes fall into a second tier of price. Rare promotional materials and collector cards (especially those that are signed or have a bit of an original costume) fall into a rough third tier. Xena merchandise seems to be near the bottom in terms of pricing. But it's important to know that any item in any category can cross over into another one in terms of price. Why? BECAUSE VALUE FLOATS (this should be every Xena collector's mantra, repeat it often).