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Posted by Jeremy on March 25, 2018 at 08:13 PM CST
Let me say this: putting together a collecting guide - especially one with prices - is a monumental task. Herculean in fact, because the moment you start you have to resign yourself to the knowledge that when you think you're done there are umpteen more collectibles to add to the book and there's been a market shift in prices.
So be clear when I say that writing these are not fun it is from experience. With that said submitting your price guide for peer review adds a whole level of misery that most people can't fathom, so in reviewing Beckett*'s Star Wars Collectibles Price Guide (2018 edition) I know I'm opening up old wounds. And with that I submit an advance apology to the book's author, Matt Bible.
So in this day of digital marketplaces and ever fluctuating prices what good is a printed price guide? We know that with the amount of Star Wars collectibles being added to the merchandise role call everyday it's defunct before it's printed, that the valuations are subject to the writer's search skills, tastes and speculation and getting prices off eBay is much easier.
For one there's a surety in paper; it's tangible, it's physical, it's portable and it's reassuring. While the internet may depict a fluctuating market a printed price shows a steadiness. Instead of having the headache of checking prices daily a printed price guide captures an average that a skilled valuer can pin down with some kind of accuracy. And that's what an insurance company appreciates.
Some of our readers will have only entered the Star Wars collecting fray in the last half decade, but there are others who frequent Rebelscum that have been in the hobby for long enough to use fractions of a century to indicate the length of time they've been amassing a collection that is beyond imagination. No matter where your collection is on the curve - whether you have a small bedroom shelf or more storage units than you can admit to your partner - eventually you're going to want to valuing your collection with mind to insuring it.
And this is where a good price guide comes in to its own. Your first conversation with an insurer - once you have found one who understands the nature of modern collectibles - is going to need to include inventories and values, and what better way to do this than turn to an up-to-date price guide. And - gods forbid - you have some items go missing an insurance agency won't want to have to spend their time finding out the value of the item by trawling eBay and Facebook groups. They'll want to go to the same source that you originally pegged the item's value at.
On the matter of contents all the core elements are included - vintage and modern action figures, collectible card games, miniatures, diecast cars, LEGO, comic books, vinyl figurines and (unsurprisingly being that this guide is from a company that was founded on the baseball card collecting hobby) trading cards. Additionally there are a handful of professionally written articles about different aspects of Star Wars merchandise - matter of fact there extra content is so rich that the price guide doesn't actually start until page 84 - nearly 25% of the way in.
What does it miss? The guide doesn't include food premiums, household goods, knicknacks and the throw-away ephemera that tends to fill the nooks and crannies of our collections, and while some might think this is a negative by concentrating on the core collectibles, the book is more accessible. It also doesn't include the variations that 40 years of an international franchise has generated. The price guide is only 256 pages long and the line had to be drawn somewhere. Oddly though the line was drawn in front of the popular higher-end display items that licensees such as Gentle Giant, Hot Toys, Attakus, Kotobukiya and Sideshow produce. Likewise there isn't any prop replica representation for Master Replicas, ANOVOS or eFX.
Of course, these might be in there but without a contents or index it's hard to tell. Which brings me to probably the biggest drawback of the guide - its organisation. The core sections are fine - both vintage and modern action figures are bundled into one, and the sections devoted to trading cards and collectible card games are exhaustive but the inclusion of vinyl figureines with action figures is odd, considering there is a miscellaneous section. Speaking of which this odds-and-sods section is largely made up of LEGO, which in my opinion, deserves its own section - if not separate publication.
However I can't get over the order of the modern action figures section. Though the vintage toys are ordered in movie line, with cardback sub-types represented within each, so that you can start with the Early Bird figures and move forwards in time to the Droids and Ewoks lines, the modern section jumps around - starting with the 30th Anniversary Collection and ending at The Vintage Collection, with Bendems, six and 12 inch dolls, Galactic Heroes, Epic Force and Unleashed thrown in to the mix. And, it turns out Sideshow is included in the modern action figures.
The big thing to remember is that there is a fundamental difference between a collecting and price guide: while a collecting guide will have more detail on licenses, the different lines that licensees produce and include information of product variations like different packaging styles in international markets, a price guide is a list with numbers next to it. Don't let this put you to sleep though because Beckett*'s Star Wars Collectibles Price Guide has given a fair amount of space over to photographs - and while it's not as exhaustive as those in the Rebelscum photo archive it is representative. One piece of negative feedback that can be levelled at the images - especially those in the modern action figures and LEGO sections - is that they don't have a standard and come across as being grabbed off the internet. That said, it doesn't have an significant impact on the information contained in the guide.
Admittedly I'm biased. I like to write and make lists so much that four movies ago I wrote a Star Wars collecting guide that covered much of the same material. So I asked members of Team Rebelscum to share their opinions of the book to help me out.
Shane Turgeon, who contributes to the vintage coverage at Rebelscum, has assisted with the vintage section of a number of Star Wars collecting guides and is an accredited collectibles appraiser, stated that he found "the guide under priced for today's market - which is hotter than it's ever been." He also found the inclusion of the Uzay figures nonsensical as they had no assigned values and are unliocensed merchandise (bootlegs). "Ditto for Glasslite. In fact, why even list them at all? Glasslite is but one of many international licensees so it makes sense to include all instead of just one arbitrary example."
Dustin Roberts, head honcho at TheForce.net and ex-StarWars fan club president, remarks that the Funko POP! figurine prices are dead on the money. Dustin picks these as a good investment for future collectors "due to their cheap price point, and you can remove them from the packaging with out damaging it." Dustin adds further that he moved into collecting vinyl figurines because he wanted to collect Star Wars characters, not ships or playsets, and "in comparison to a Hasbro figure these give more bang for your buck."
Taking a look at the comic section is Chris Wyman who co-hosts Jedi Journals - a long-running podcast that covers all things literature (including comic books) in the Star Wars universe. He has the opposite opinion: "The high and low looks to be pretty accurate, though some of the newer modern variants might be priced slightly higher than what you could potentially find them for if you know how to search correctly." Overall Chris feels that "they’re on the right track."
In reviewing the LEGO section, I found it to be a bit bumpy. Pricing these toys is highly problemmatic because there are a number of methods that can be used and each gives a different result. Take the Ewok Village (10236); the Beckett* price guide has a top end price of $350 while eBay has sold listings in the low $300s, and Bricklink has their high at $370. While the Beckett* price sits squarely in between these two values it doesn't serve as a high, but as a mean high which isn't quite the same. Also noted is a number of unpriced LEGO Star Wars items. These were typically promotional or convention exclusives which rarely come up on eBay, and when they do they aren't common enough to calculate an average price.
"Problem with eBay is that you can look back to the last 90 days only."
Overall this price guide is a good option to valuing your collection. For the most part the prices are in the favour of the owner rather than someone who wants to buy (a boon if you have to make an insurance claim), the content covers the most popular sections of the hobby, the guide itself is mostly easy to follow (unless you're big on modern action figures). It's printed in a magazine format which binding won't stand the test of time, but this being the second Beckett* guide - and a third one slated for the end of this year - would indicate that the publisher intends for these not to last a year. Let's hope they are committed to getting these right, because if they are then an annually corrected price guide will be a practical aide to collecting.
