New subject: Have You Protected Your Collection? Now Lilith...

3 Apr 2005

David Corbin wrote:

...
  > On Behalf
Of Billy Pettit  

 >He left most of his estate to his church.  The
fanzines were left to a
>University collection.  He mentioned this is letters and conversations -
>but not in the will.  
 >But probate ruled that the church gets
everything since it wasn't in the 
>will.  The church wass fighting to keep the stuff because they smell big 
>money.  
 If they smell money, they are unlikely to scrap it off the top. They should
 be contacted...

 >So the collection now is lost to the group
that would appreciate it 
>most. I know of two major collections of science fiction lost the same 
>way.    
 See above...were they really lost???

 >One of them was original art worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars.  
 Sounds like money to me..

 This does not changer the fact that you NEED to document your desires to
 make sure the person (o organization) YOU WANT gets your posessions...

 But it its CRITICAL to differentiate something which is lost/DESTROYED from
 something that merely goes to a different destination..

The difference is not as big as you think.  These collections usually 
are taken to auction houses.  They sort out the few items that can sell 
for big bucks.  The rest are discarded.  Once in a while they will be 
sold by the pound.  But ususally it goes in the dumpster.

Thus the best sf collection ever put together, that of Sam Moskowitz, 
now is about 5% of its original size.

Worse, the desisions relative to what to keep, are made by appraisers 
with limited information.  They research but the info is not always 
accurate, or subject to misunderstanding.  For example, the recent 
article on Business Week online could mislead an appraiser about the 
value of PDP-8s.  It mentions the different models, but doesn't include 
all the info on how to tell rare from common.

That's what happened to the fanzine collection I mentioned.  The lawyer 
found a collection that had been donated with a huge assigned value.  So 
he concluded all fanzine collections were worth a few hundred thousand.

You see it all the time on eBay, all those "solid gold rare" Apple IIs 
for hundreds of dollars.

The saddest of all is that those items that are not easy to research, 
that don't have a lot info on the Internet or books.  So their true 
rarety and value is not appreciated.  As an example, the recent April 
fool joke, what is the value of a G-15?  How would a person know?

Billy