This Seller Wished Upon The Right Star (Disney Pipe Auction)
- Thread starter buroak
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It’s not entirely surprising to see a lesser pipe go for a lot of money. In other fields of collecting, the better known, most desirable items usually command a premium. What ends up happening is that dealers only focus on locating and stocking those high spot type items and the lesser known ones get ignored and remain unseen in the dark; no one bothers to save those, and many get overlooked or discarded—fewer survive, making them rarer. For an advanced collector who already has the popular, desirable objects, the more obscure, lesser known ones become important to filling out a collection. Imagine having located 999 out of 1,000 items on a checklist, and after many years, you’ve never come across that missing piece. When that lesser known piece emerges, the completist-type collector is willing and desperate to pay far more than most other people so as not to miss out on something that is far more difficult to find than the well known pieces. Been there, done that.
I had something similar happen to one of my sales. It has little to do with the market value of the pipe in question. One buyer gets a bee in his or her bonnet about a particular pipe but runs into competition from another potential buyer. Most often, one or the other buyer backs down. Sometimes, though, a feeding frenzy breaks out. In my case, I was selling an unsmoked pipe that I had recently purchased. It went for literally double the price I'd just paid for it. If I could figure out how to make such a thing happen, I would -- and would be richer because of it. But it's about human emotion taking sway over judgment in the heat of battle.
