There’s a little town nestled way up in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia that I’ve had a sentimental attachment for ever since I received a magic phone call from there in the year 2009. The name of the town is Bluefield. The phone call was from the family of a photographer of the
Bluefield Daily Telegraph who had inherited from their deceased father, Nicola Buzzo, a huge collection of girlie magazines and movie and TV publicity photographs. So in 2009 I made the six hour drive from my home in Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bluefield and bought this monumental and most wonderful collection. I sold most of it on ebay and kept the best parts for myself like I always do. As all collectibles dealers know, finding collections is a chancy, unpredictable process. And collections usually only come one to a town, especially a small town like Bluefield. So over the years since 2009 I sometimes warmly remembered my fateful trip to Bluefield but I never imagined I would return there someday. But Fate had other plans for me; I did return to Bluefield in late June of 2018.
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| My second trip to Bluefield in 2018 didn’t yield as much bounty as my first trip in 2009. But, when you can buy lots of books like these for about $1.23 per book I can’t complain too much. |
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The catalyst for my second trip to Bluefield started on the internet auction house Proxibid. I occasionally look on Proxibid for items to buy since I had some luck there a few years ago buying a large collection of Star Trek convention photos from the early 1970s. But since then I’ve had little luck on Proxibid. But in late June 2018 one night I was fooling around on Proxibid and stumbled into an auction that was liquidating a collection of motion picture and TV books from the estate of Edward McQuail III of Bluefield, West Virginia. I collect high grade movie and TV books and the photos of the several auction lots showed me these books were in really nice shape with dustjackets that weren’t badly scuffed or torn like you frequently find them in used bookstores. The owners of those used bookstores are usually to cheap to buy plastic dustcovers for their book’s dustjackets so the dustjackets get scuffed and torn from the customers manhandling the books. Also the bookstore owners also deface the book by writing the price in pencil inside the book. It’s always better to buy books from private collectors who haven’t written in their books and handled them gently over the years.
The bid prices for Mr. Quail’s books were really low a few days before the auction was to close but I knew that would probably change in the last few hours when all the lurking bidders would make their moves. I wasn’t going to be online when the auctions were to close so I made the highest bids I wanted and didn’t check back until the auctions closed. I figured I would be outbid on about 75% of the lots I bid on like I usually am. To my surprise I won all 13 lots of books and at dirt cheap prices. Click here for the list of lots won and final hammer prices. The most I had to pay was $18 for Lot 150 because it had some John Wayne books in it. I was especially pleased with the results of Lot 517 where I stole four boxes of books for $1.00. I’m sure these books would have sold for more money if this auction had bidders on site at an auction house location. But fortunately for me the Bluefield auction company that handled Mr. McQuail’s estate was one of those small outfits that doesn’t have a physical location. The auctioneers in those cases just lists the items on Proxibid so only internet bidders will ever see them.
I was plenty pleased with myself for winning over 200 mostly hardcover books over 30 years old for a paltry $92.41. I figured the postage would be another $200 so I would still be getting a lot of books cheap. But a few days later I got a big shock. I received a call from the United Parcel Service (UPS) store that the auction company uses for mailing its lots to the winning bidders. The UPS store told me they had 17 boxes of books and the mailing cost was $800! I said I wasn’t going to pay that much for postage and hung up the phone. I next called the Bluefield auction company and asked them to ship the books Media Mail through the US Post Office but they told me they only used UPS and it said so in the auction Terms of Sale which I had never bothered to read. So, I resigned myself to just not getting the books and losing my $92.41.
However over the next few days I couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling of missing out on a rare collection of books and I decided to drive to Bluefield to get them. I called the UPS store and asked them to hold the books until I could get there. They said they could only release the books to the auction house. So I called the auction house and asked them to call the UPS store and give them permission to release the books to me.
I left next day for the six hour drive to Bluefield from Virginia Beach. I knew I couldn’t get 17 boxes in my Honda Accord and the auction house had told me they had taken all the books I won in flimsy boxes to the UPS store which would repack them in sturdier boxes for mailing. So, I took seven of my own empty boxes with me to mail back from Bluefield. I got to the UPS store with only a little time before the Post Office was due to close. I wanted to mail the seven boxes before it closed because I didn’t want to increase my expenses by having to spend the night in a hotel in Bluefield. I hurriedly emptied out seven boxes of books in the UPS store and repacked them in my own boxes. Then I drove the boxes to the Post Office and made it a few minutes before they closed. On the way to the Post Office I caught a welcome glimpse of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph building where Mr. Buzzo had worked that I had never seen on my first trip to Bluefield in 2009. Then I rushed back to the UPS store, loaded the remaining 10 boxes in my car and started the six hour return trip for home. My Honda car was heavily overweighted with 10 heavy boxes and I had to drive down the narrow, twisting mountain roads from Bluefield back to the main Interstate 77 freeway. I was thankful that I had replaced my worn out brakes on my car about a week earlier.
Mailing the seven boxes from the Post Office costs only about $92 and I spent about $50 in gas on the round trip journey to Bluefield. I considered that a big improvement over the $800 the UPS store wanted to mail all 17 boxes. So I now have all my lovely top condition movie books safely at home and I enjoyed a nostalgic second visit to Bluefield. I also learned something when bidding in future Proxibid auctions: read the Terms of Sale.
