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“Got any topo postcards of Hartlepool (or other location)?”

“Where do you keep the Belgian topo?”

“Are these topo prints of Easington in Yorkshire or Easington, County Durham?”

And so it goes for hundreds of different product types and millions of different locations.
 

Click alongside to read: Bank Big Profits Selling Vintage Topographical View Postcards on eBay
 

You’ll find named locations depicted on pottery and paintings, books and badges, daggers and dog collars. But it’s named places on paper that usually attract the highest interest among collectors, and the highest profits too.

Paper collectibles have other major benefits for sellers over topographical items depicted on materials like china and metal, wood and brick.

Those other items are heavy, costly to post, they take up lots of space in your home or other business premises, and they’ll rarely be offered in bulk or priced sufficiently low to provide decent profits for resellers.

Paper though, is usually flat and easy to store, also consuming very little space. Paper is easy to pack, inexpensive to post, and can often be purchased in bulk at local auctions, flea markets and boot sales.

There’s another major reason why immense profits can be made on paper items costing pennies buy and fetching high mark ups on eBay. It has to do with the fact that our ancestors (Victorian being the most popular era for paper collectibles) accumulated and kept vast amounts of paper items and those items were usually kept together for many decades until someone finally decided to sell them, usually at auction. So it’s no great surprise to find auction salesrooms packed with huge boxes and tea chests filled with paper items and fetching just a few quid each on the day. Inside those boxes and chests you might find hundreds, even thousands of items relating to local, national and even worldwide locations.

They can fetch amazing prices on eBay where it isn’t uncommon for one item from an auction lot to fetch more than you pay for the entire boxful.

As an example, last year at auction in Yorkshire, I picked up two huge cardboard boxes, each containing more than 2,000 theatre programmes from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I paid just £100 for each box, about 5 pence per programme. I happen to know that theatre programmes are collectable in their own right, and sometimes for specific actors and actresses. But I also know that theatre programmes and most other paper collectibles are in greater demand and fetch higher prices for their topographical element than as paper items per se.

So I split the programmes into UK, USA, worldwide locations. Next I split country piles into towns and cities and started work on piles for the UK and USA. I kept other country items to one side for the time being. Then I split individual town and city programmes according to quality, with near mint items kept separate from others in good to poor condition.

I scanned top quality items individually, and listed UK programmes on eBay UK, American items on eBay.com.

Within weeks I had some programmes fetch ten or twenty pounds each, thirty or forty fetched between thirty and seventy each, and ten sold at £100 plus. I still have thousands of items left to list.

More than this, with around forty years experience of collecting, buying and selling paper items, officially termed ‘ephemera’, I know theatre programmes are just one of many paper items that can bought for pennies and sold pounds purely for their topographical interest. Those other items include:

Advertisements, Advertising Novelties, Almanacs, Bank Notes, Beer Mats, Bill Heads, Blotters, Bonds and Share Certificates, Bookmarks, Bus Tickets, Business Cards, Calendars, Cheques, Documents, Ephemera, Film Posters, Film Programs, Football, Programs, Funeral Items, Genealogy, Guidebooks, Letters, Letterheads and Invoices, Local Interest, Maps, Newspapers, Packaging, Personal Documents, Photographs, Postcards, Posters, Prints, Public Notices, Railway Tickets, Scrapbooks, Scraps, Share Certificates, Suicide Notes, Theatre Programmes, Trade Catalogues ….

… and any, or all of those items, can be found in those huge box lots that generally attract low bidding at auction.

The reason they fail to fetch high prices locally?

It’s because of another four-letter word involved in the days between buying and selling those items. That word is ‘work’, which few people seem to like, and most local auction buyers prefer to make big profits on one or two select items.

However, anyone prepared to work at sifting and sorting, scanning and listing all this fabulous topo stuff can easily make £1,000 or more every week on eBay!

 

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