Hi Jim & All,

When Jim H. originally asked his question about collectors selling to
users, there were some other things going on re my being a collector
that led to my not answering. Now that Jim has summarized his thinking
and my other dust has sellted a bit, I'll offer a few comments on his
question and summary.

I'll repeat that I was always solely a collector; the only used user
tools I ever bought were a couple of bar clamps and a box lot of mixed
chisels. I guess a few of my tools might be of interest to users as well
as collectors, but most of them were so definitely collector only items
that selling or not to users was never a question I thought to be of any
relevance. In general, I'd agree with those expressed sentiments
supporting the sale of relatively common tools to users but being
somewhat hesitant about seeing truly rare ones not go to a collector.

One thing that merits mention is that most truly rare tools are truly
rare because they didn't work very well. To the extent that a currrent
user recognized that fact, he/she probably wouldn't want it anyhow.
However, a characteristic of the old tool market that I've always found
surprising is that such truly rare tools usually sell quite cheaply and
might thus be more tempting to a user than some more common thing for
which there's more demand. Putting this another way, Stanley 1's are NOT
rare; there are thousands of them around. But they are recognized and
desired by thousands of collectors and users so they bring high prices.
No such recognition and demand exists for another tool that's the only
one of its kind (or one of only a very few known), so it sells cheap. I
always had an eye for and attraction to such "different" tools, so my
collection had a disproportional number of those and not a single
Stanley plane or such. I might be a bit hesitant about seeing one of
those go to a user, but not to a point that I'd try to deny his right to
buy it. I'd be more hesitant about seeing it go to a museum. This might
be a pet personal peeve, but I know of too many things in museums that
are in some back room "study" collection rather than on display and are
not really avialable for "study" because no one, including the owning
museum, knows they're there. Tools are much more available for study if
in the private collections of members of EAIA or MWTCA or such.

Now that I've offended museum people as well as my earlier offending
users, I'd better shut up.

Best Wishes,
Bob - who doesn't so much mean to be offensive as seem to have a natural
talent.

I would agree with Bob that Museums are among the worst collectors of all,
since they usually have stuff in back rooms that may never be displayed
again.

There is hope for those museum collections with the web and search engines,
especially search engines based on pictures (Google has an images search
engine).

I wonder if we could start a professional group that would offer its
services to museums with tools in their storage rooms. At little or no
cost, members of the group would create web based catalogs of their tools.

Not sure what the professional qualifications would be, but the oldtools
group could offer backup on tool identification where necessary and even
proof the web pages.

Brent

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Nelson" <reeinelson@w...>
> and my other dust has sellted a bit, I'll offer a few comments on his
                        ^^^^^^^
Could not pass up this little slip.

[snip]
> Now that I've offended museum people as well as my earlier offending
> users, I'd better shut up.