Good Junk Hunting, May 10, 2025: Estate and Yard Sales

Does this count as book hunting? Album hunting? Not really enough of either to be specific. I spotted signs for a nearby estate sale on Thursday and Friday, so I brought my youngest who wanted to look for collectibles like coins and cards (which would be long gone by Saturday, but he came along anyway). The southern campus of our church was also having a sale to raise money for the pre-school, and we discovered another church sale along the way.

And I got a couple things.

For books, I got:

• Days of Our Lives: The Complete Family Album. While I was in college, my stepmother recorded the program (on VCR, young man, not Tivo) and I’d catch bits of it when she caught up on Friday nights. This was in the Fake Roman/John storyline era, so early 1990s. The student union common had a big television (a big deal in 1990), and it was tuned to this show during the lunch hour. I fantasized about striking up a conversation with a girl and talking about the show, but I never did. The only girl I ever struck a conversation with out of the blue was Brandy in my biology class my freshman year, which was like my first college class ever. But she was wearing a Billy Joel tour shirt, so clearly we had musical taste in common, although I would not see Billy Joel in concert for another decade.
• Danmark, a book about Denmark whose text is in four different languages. So the picture to reading will be slightly higher than otherwise.
• A Garden Full of Love: The Fragrance of Friendship by Sandra Kuck. A collection not unlike an issue of Ideals.
• Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. I recently saw the film Christmas with the Kranks where “recently” means 2023.
• The Treasure Chest, a collection of quotes and poems grouped by them by Charles L. Wallis. It must have been a great gift in the 1960s, as Ebay shows a variety of editions at different price points (but not very high). The previous owner must have liked it, as it yielded three Found Bookmarks: A Christmas Card, a church service bulletin from 2001, and a Pick 4 lottery ticket from 1987. Which means the previous owner looked through it and/or marked things in at least two different decades.

I also got a Christmas record, Christmas Music from France; I’ve already played it, and only my beautiful wife, who is studying French, might be able to determine it’s Christmas music if she listened carefully.

I got a Kenny G CD, Miracles, which is also a Christmas album.

I got a little handheld Blackjack game for a buck which I didn’t have to wait to test at home as it has working batteries already (which might almost be worth the price I paid for the game). I also got a pack of Elvis trading card, apparently from 1992. The pack was partially opened, so my son pooh-poohed the purchase even though it’s the only thing like cards we saw today. I paid a buck for it and brought it home and learned (by, again, looking at Ebay) that Ebay is rife with unopened packs for $1. Which led me to a good lecture about the economics of collectibles. Namely, that when Boomers were hitting their play money years, they wanted things from their childhood–toys, baseball cards, comic books–which were scarce because they and their parents considered them to be disposable. So they were chasing after limited stock. But their splashing money around led to a bunch of new comic and trading card companies and sets springing up, and the Boomers were snapping them up not only enjoyment, but as a speculative investment. Which leads to a glut of unopened sets of Elvis cards in peoples’ basements or climate-controlled storage facilities and listed on Ebay for less than their inflation-adjusted original price.

He’s been buying a hella lotta Pokémon cards lately, hoping to find valuable cards in packs. I guess the company is not flooding the market but are consciously choosing some scarcity, but the biggest scores and highest prices in the secondhand market are going to be from the early sets of the cards from 30 years ago, when, again, they were a toy and were not expected to be investments.

I guess the way to hit it in that sort of collectible market is to find a commodity that everyone thought was disposable but where eventual scarcity might lead to value if anyone bothers to collect mementoes of their youth in their middle age. I’m not sure this will occur to generations beyond Gen X. Maybe early, early millenials (90s kids). What do the others have good memories of their youths? Interchangeable smartphones and tablets mostly.