Well, I see that the sheet that I mentioned has sold for £37.00 after a 24 hour auction period, making a healthy profit on the sellers initial investment of £15.00.
A different seller (UK based) has put another of these sheets up for £50.00
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Unseen-university-octogram-sheet/322675807104?_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIM.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D45993%26meid%3Dd33ac27f60c34b79b6b51fa46eff8fd2%26pid%3D100011%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D122668811877&_trksid=p2047675.c100011.m1850So the profit motive is obviously attracting people to the limited edition Discworld stamp market. Is this a good thing?
I can readily imagine a situation arising with future limited edition sheets, and perhaps LBE's too, where people are attracted by the potential profits to be made, (considerably over a 100% profit margin) for an investment made for only a fortnight or so... I'm not going to calculate an APR for these profits but they would be considerable to say the least.
It's my opinion, (and it's only an opinion), that setting out to deliberately profit like this from the hard work of the designers and the good folk at the shop is contrary to the decent behaviour exhibited by the vast majority of the Discworld stamp fraternity and sorority.
Suppose someone queued all night before the release of a Hogswatch limited edition of 500 LBE's, marched into the shop and plonked £2500.00 down on the counter and bought the lot with the intention of making a huge profit by selling them later at a massive mark-up? They would be entitled to some compensation for their cold night spent on the pavement outside the shop certainly, and for making the financial investment, but not to the extent of holding the rest of the hobby to ransom with their dubiously gotten monopoly. Of course no-one would be forced to buy them at an obscene mark-up, but many of us find gaping holes in our collections are about as welcome as cavities in our teeth!
I'm confident that our friends at the shop wouldn't allow such a thing to happen of course, but where would they have to draw the line? 25 LBE's? 50? 100? Half the whole release?
The more LBE's a person buys, the greater their chances of obtaining rare sports, or prize tickets, and that would seem to be an entirely legitimate practise. The items are intended for their own collections, not purely for profit.
Would Moist Von Lipwig have allowed a person to buy every sheet of the blue triangles on the morning that they were released at the AMPO? Of course he would, but he'd have been straight round to Teemer and Spools to order some more!
Now old and scarce Discworld stamp items like the Skunk Cabbage green in a jar, Blue Triangle sports, or the Assassin Whitebacks have changed hands for much larger figures, but these have been held lovingly in peoples collections for many years, and sometimes a change in circumstances of the owner can force them to have to put their treasured rarities up for sale or auction to raise emergency cash. Often such an item may have already changed hands several times before through trades or private sales, with the cost increasing each time they changed hands. I see these sales as entirely legitimate as the value of the items sold usually increases as the years fly by... In some cases only 10 or even fewer ever became available and were found in LBE's by very lucky people who were in at the start of the days of Discworld stamp collecting. My hat's off to those lucky few!
On the flip side, highly scarce items have on occasions been swapped or even given to other collectors by noble people to whom the hobby and their friends enjoyment of it takes precedence over the profit motive. Others give away early commons, or sell old sports to new and enthusiastic collectors for a fraction of what they might have fetched on e-bay. Bloody good luck to these selfless collectors who act from the very best of motives, and who are a huge credit to the hobby.
It would be very interesting to find out what other collectors think, so that we can have some kind of reasoned debate on this subject. Perhaps some of you feel that I'm entirely out of order for even raising the issue, others may feel that some discussion would be beneficial... without feedback we'll never know.
I can only conclude that I'm paying off Karma at a vastly accelerated rate.
Susan Ivanova. Babylon 5