Measuring scarcity 1 1

[RC Smith]

So most collectors are probably familiar with the Gerber Photojournals and possibly even own a set of the books; I myself do and I love them!! If nothing else, they serves as an excellent reminder of all the great Golden Age, and to some extent Silver Age, books that are out there; and also serves as a reminder that our wallets have limitations (amazing amount of fantastic cover art out there, but we can buy it all). Another interesting, albeit somewhat flawed, aspect of these great guides that came out in the 1980’s was a scarcity index, which is now decades old. That’s a lot of time for things to change due to things like unknown collections, etc. So my fellow collectors, does anybody know if there is a more recent take on measuring scarcity? Seems to me, no matter the method, they is always going to be some subjectivity in the mix. For those that might be interested in even attempting to calculate scarcity, what method(s) do you employ? I for one was using the Gerber for that (with a grain of salt of course) purpose back in the 80’s. Just curious what folks think. 

[theCapraAegagrus]

CGC is all that matters, and they have a Census.

Spoiler

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/12/2021 at 2:59 PM, RC Smith said:

Just curious what folks think. 

Personally, I think scarcity has to be linked to desirability for it to hold any widespread collector interest. I own hundreds of UK Price Variant copies of US original comics which are the only copies I have ever seen. But no one else collects them, or is interested in them, so it sort of doesn't matter in the wider context. The calculations are there to be researched, sure, but what is the point if the books in question hold little to no collector interest? 

I'm noticing more and more sellers in the UK who are listing books at crazy, plucked out of the air prices, just because they are perceived to be scarce. They are trying to force high prices on books that have limited appeal and, therefore, would likely go for much less in an auction environment with a handful of interested parties competing. So I think you have to balance any work that you do on scarcity with a recognition of desirability, otherwise you produce a body of work that no one is interested in reading. 

[lizards2]

On 10/12/2021 at 7:16 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Personally, I think scarcity has to be linked to desirability for it to hold any widespread collector interest. I own hundreds of UK Price Variant copies of US original comics which are the only copies I have ever seen. But no one else collects them, or is interested in them, so it sort of doesn't matter in the wider context. The calculations are there to be researched, sure, but what is the point if the books in question hold little to no collector interest? 

I'm noticing more and more sellers in the UK who are listing books at crazy, plucked out of the air prices, just because they are perceived to be scarce. They are trying to force high prices on books that have limited appeal and, therefore, would likely go for much less in an auction environment with a handful of interested parties competing. So I think you have to balance any work that you do on scarcity with a recognition of desirability, otherwise you produce a body of work that no one is interested in reading. 

As a side note, I do love pence copies and seek them out. If they are high enough in grade, they replace the cents copies. Sometimes, I keep the lower-graded pence editions, so that I can compare the two copies side-by-side. Pence are a great piece of history, and I appreciate all the work you do to enlighten us dull-wits on the topic!  

[MetalPSI]

Having deja vu

There's a thread around here somewhere 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/12/2021 at 3:28 PM, lizards2 said:

As a side note, I do love pence copies and seek them out. If they are high enough in grade, they replace the cents copies. Sometimes, I keep the lower-graded pence editions, so that I can compare the two copies side-by-side. Pence are a great piece of history, and I appreciate all the work you do to enlighten us dull-wits on the topic!  

Cheers Mike. As a further side note, I have close to a 100 post research thread pre-written on Charlton comics in the UK covering 1958 to the company's demise in 1986. Hundreds of comic images within them - some real crackers that I know you will love, certainly within the 58-65 cover date window. I can't get admin's attention though, on a key requirement, so may give up now and start my own blog, as many others have done. I'll let you know if I go down that road. Thanks again for the kind words which, today, I needed. 

[lizards2]

On 10/12/2021 at 8:11 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

On 10/12/2021 at 7:28 AM, lizards2 said:

As a side note, I do love pence copies and seek them out. If they are high enough in grade, they replace the cents copies. Sometimes, I keep the lower-graded pence editions, so that I can compare the two copies side-by-side. Pence are a great piece of history, and I appreciate all the work you do to enlighten us dull-wits on the topic!  

Cheers Mike. As a further side note, I have close to a 100 post research thread pre-written on Charlton comics in the UK covering 1958 to the company's demise in 1986. Hundreds of comic images within them - some real crackers that I know you will love, certainly within the 58-65 cover date window. I can't get admin's attention though, on a key requirement, so may give up now and start my own blog, as many others have done. I'll let you know if I go down that road. Thanks again for the kind words which, today, I needed. 

Yeah - I collect the Charltons too! I guess many might guess we were just talking about Marvels. I just recently picked up a high grade Flying Nurses in the VF+ range...., for cheap. 

The neat thing about Charltons is that production quality was so poor, you could have five copies of the same issue, and everyone one of them looks different.  I have some Captain Atoms like that where I was trying to sort out the highest graded one to keep, but couldn't disrupt the "rainbow" of differences visible when you have so many of the same issue together.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/12/2021 at 5:13 PM, lizards2 said:

Yeah - I collect the Charltons too! I guess many might guess we were just talking about Marvels. I just recently picked up a high grade Flying Nurses in the VF+ range...., for cheap. 

The neat thing about Charltons is that production quality was so poor, you could have five copies of the same issue, and everyone one of them looks different.  I have some Captain Atoms like that where I was trying to sort out the highest graded one to keep, but couldn't disrupt the "rainbow" of differences visible when you have so many of the same issue together.

Marvel is pretty much the only game in town for most UKPV collectors it seems, yes. I love a Charlton dupe for the same reason - you rarely find two issues the same. Love em...

[lizards2]

On 10/12/2021 at 9:29 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Marvel is pretty much the only game in town for most UKPV collectors it seems, yes. I love a Charlton dupe for the same reason - you rarely find two issues the same. Love em...

 Together, we might have the entire UK print run!  

[Qalyar]

Scarcity is useful, even divorced from collector demand. If you happen to want to add some weird book to your collection that no one else seems to want, different strategies are required if there were 20000 copies produced, or 200 copies, or 20 copies.

[Vixom]

Number available. Unfortunately that is hard to figure out on many things. Census is good for valuable in demand books for cgc buyers. Majority of collectors I know or sell to buy raw and will never slab them. So census doesn't tell me how many copies exist. Do I times the census by 3 or 4 or what? Maybe as years go on and collectors sell or die off most books will be slabbed. I use price. I have a lot of scarce items, many one of a kind. But if nobody is interested in them it doesn't matter. These bronze and silver age comics aren't what I would call scarce but when the majority of collectors would like to own one then they are scarce. 

 

[thehumantorch]

On 10/12/2021 at 3:21 PM, Thisisrequired said:

Number available. Unfortunately that is hard to figure out on many things. Census is good for valuable in demand books for cgc buyers. Majority of collectors I know or sell to buy raw and will never slab them. So census doesn't tell me how many copies exist. Do I times the census by 3 or 4 or what? Maybe as years go on and collectors sell or die off most books will be slabbed. I use price. I have a lot of scarce items, many one of a kind. But if nobody is interested in them it doesn't matter. These bronze and silver age comics aren't what I would call scarce but when the majority of collectors would like to own one then they are scarce. 

 

Census is inaccurate as the numbers for many books are inflated by the crack, press, and resubmit gang. 

It's also inaccurate if the book generally isn't worth getting graded.  There may be thousands of copies but if nobody wants to spend the money to get one graded there's nothing on census.

[kav]

On 10/12/2021 at 9:29 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Marvel is pretty much the only game in town for most UKPV collectors it seems, yes. I love a Charlton dupe for the same reason - you rarely find two issues the same. Love em...

 

[MattTheDuck]

It's an interesting question.  I'm operating on the assumption that the books I collect - primarily Silver Age, but a small slice of Golden Age as well - are becoming more scarce each year, both to me as a collector and in general.  This is happening in a variety of ways, including collectors who buy and "lock up" their books not to be sold for a long period, and unwitting degradation/destruction of books.  Like a lot of people, my parents threw out my 60s baseball card collection when I wasn't looking - I'm sure this is happening to comics and some are damaged by improper storage, weather events, etc.  Supply is decreasing and demand seems to be increasing in a general sort of way.

Adding to the perceived scarcity are your personal goals in collecting.  You may be uninterested in the "grade" of a comic, which makes them less rare.  If, however, you're trying to get near mint, white page copies, with perfect wrap and centering, your available universe is much smaller.  Higher prices also increase scarcity for individual collectors.

I also think in some ways, comics are less scarce - today, you can easily find for sale (disregarding price or grade) almost any comic you might desire.  The internet dramatically decreased scarcity.  It's not hard to imagine a non-internet world in which you might never be able to find some issues, or at least have a long and arduous hunt on your hands.

I'm going to be very interested to see if we get an explosion of "Promise Collection-like" finds that contain only Silver Age books in the next decade.  

[mycomicshop]

I recently worked on exactly this question--producing a number loosely reflecting scarcity. I'm currently using a sum of census + our current stock + our previous sales + known previous listings/sales on ebay. The point of the number isn't to accurately model how many copies exist, but to give a general idea of how frequently an issue has appeared within the larger market.

[Vixom]

On 10/12/2021 at 5:29 PM, thehumantorch said:

Census is inaccurate as the numbers for many books are inflated by the crack, press, and resubmit gang. 

It's also inaccurate if the book generally isn't worth getting graded.  There may be thousands of copies but if nobody wants to spend the money to get one graded there's nothing on census.

This is true. I have never looked at the census before. But according to auction sites I have many books that are the highest graded on it. Many more 3rd highest etc. Only because 1 single person on the planet thought they were worthy of grading. 

[catman76]

There's many threads in the golden age forum about corrections to the gerber scarcity index numbers, but for the most part is still pretty accurate for superhero comics and the more in demand comics. But since Gerber and most collectors don't care about anything else and ignored anything but superhero comics back then and still do, the numbers for anything that's not a superhero comic are way off most of the time. Gerber didn't even bother photographing probably a thousand non superhero comics and just skipped them and it seems just assigned anything non superhero random scarcity numbers, giving them 5's or 4's when there are so many I know should be 7's or 8's or even 9's. There's also so many mistakes in the information for non superhero comics in the Gerber journal just because he didn't care about them.

Figuring out how many copies exist of pre1960 comics is pretty easy since not many have survived and there's only a couple hundred copies that exist of the most common ones. Anything after that is pretty impossible to calculate because there are thousands and thousands of existing copies.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/13/2021 at 1:27 AM, mycomicshop said:

I recently worked on exactly this question--producing a number loosely reflecting scarcity. I'm currently using a sum of census + our current stock + our previous sales + known previous listings/sales on ebay. The point of the number isn't to accurately model how many copies exist, but to give a general idea of how frequently an issue has appeared within the larger market.

That's about the best way to determine scarcity - a thorough assessment of copies available / sold through the majority of accessible channels. This argument often comes up when discussing later newsstand copies. There is a fierce critique from some of any attempt to put a figure on the newsstand to direct ratio, but the salient point is that, in many cases, some books are next to impossible to find. That doesn't mean that they do not exist in significant numbers, squirrelled away in collections, just that you may struggle if you decide to try and buy one.

If I may ask, with no snark intended, do you price any in stock books that you have assessed with their comparative scarcity in mind, regardless of perceived desirability?

[mycomicshop]

On 10/13/2021 at 2:58 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

That's about the best way to determine scarcity - a thorough assessment of copies available / sold through the majority of accessible channels. This argument often comes up when discussing later newsstand copies. There is a fierce critique from some of any attempt to put a figure on the newsstand to direct ratio, but the salient point is that, in many cases, some books are next to impossible to find. That doesn't mean that they do not exist in significant numbers, squirrelled away in collections, just that you may struggle if you decide to try and buy one.

If I may ask, with no snark intended, do you price any in stock books that you have assessed with their comparative scarcity in mind, regardless of perceived desirability?

Yes, for the most part. If we identify an item as scarce we'll price that item higher than if we found it to be more common, all else equal (desirability/demand). But there's definitely a fair divide between "scarce and interesting," and "scarce but nobody particularly cares."

We also began tagging items as "Scarce" in our prime auctions a year or so ago: https://www.mycomicshop.com/auctions?agid=513&isscarce=1 Right now that tagging isn't based specifically on the single scarcity number I mentioned above, but it's applied as a judgment call based on the inputs to that number (census, stock, sales, known listings on ebay, etc)

[OuterBanks]

On 10/12/2021 at 10:28 AM, lizards2 said:

As a side note, I do love pence copies and seek them out. If they are high enough in grade, they replace the cents copies. Sometimes, I keep the lower-graded pence editions, so that I can compare the two copies side-by-side. Pence are a great piece of history, and I appreciate all the work you do to enlighten us dull-wits on the topic!  

 

Canadian price variant, jewelers insert, $.35 price variants, newsstand - it's just a matter of time before someone manufactures the hype and demand for the pence variant.  A few spec vids on YouTube and we're good to go