The Signature Is Only the Beginning

When most people first enter the autograph hobby, they naturally focus on the name.

Is it somebody famous? Is the signature rare? What is it worth?

After more than four decades around autographs and collectors, I’ve learned that those questions are only the beginning.

The items that stay with us are usually the ones that have a story.

Maybe it is a photograph signed at a convention you attended with your father. A baseball handed to you when you were ten years old. A movie prop connected to a scene you have watched a hundred times. Or an autograph you searched for year after year until one finally surfaced.

That is what makes collecting different from simply buying things.

Every collectible has two kinds of value. There is the value the marketplace gives it, and there is the value its story gives it.

Sometimes those numbers are very different.

A collector may own a piece worth thousands of dollars and still refuse to part with a $75 autograph because of where it came from, who gave it to them, or what it represents.

That is something price guides can never completely measure.

It is also one of the reasons we built CollectorFish.

I wanted collectors to have a place where the hunt matters again — where somebody can say, “I have been looking for this for twenty years,” and another collector somewhere can answer, “I have one.”

Because finding the item is exciting.

But finding your item is something entirely different.

So keep casting lines. Keep telling people what you are searching for. Keep building your Vault. And most importantly, remember the stories that go with the things you collect.

Years from now, those stories may be the most valuable part of the collection.

— Kevin Martin