I was going through my storage bin today, and found a couple things A) I cannot believe I spent good money on and B) I cannot believe anyone would buy if I put it up for sale. I don't want to put it in the Goodwill box, because it's not kid safe. Seems destined for the land fill. Am I a monster?
Not intentionally but accidentally yes. One of my first big boxes from Celga had about 15 toys. The box was rather big. There was a lot of bubble wrap and smoky newspaper. I took out what I thought was everything.. and tossed the box. Only to find out weeks later I left a toy in there. I was furious but nothing much I could do.
Category A for me. I've been lucky enough to offload and if I cannot, they have been given away or donated. This was something we encountered early on in collecting when we were unfocused but we've been more selective with our purchases so this should be a rare occurrence now.
This is exactly where I am right now. Some stuff just doesn't fit anymore and I don't really care about it. There are some good pieces I didn't quite want to part with but with limited space I have to get rid of. To me the ideal collection is a mix of grails of quality artists and grails that come from the heart (gifts and mementos) that can be spread out and enjoyed from multiple angles, so I don't want to have things dense because I have so much of it.
I threw out a toy once...well a janitor did at my job one night by accident. I had Lil Japan do a custom Evil on blank white vinyl. He did an amazing job. I had received it just before I went in to work that evening, so I took it with me. I kept it behind my desk at my foot in the shipping box. I left for a few moments and when I came back it was gone--but I didn't notice right away (just me and another guy at the desk that night and the general public couldn't just come behind the desk.) Anyway, once I realized it was gone, I asked the housekeeping staff and this guy said he threw it out thinking it was just a box. The janitor guy felt really bad about it so after the shift was over we went out to the dumpsters to look for it. We were elbow-deep in summer garbage in the dumpster out back at 1am trying to find it after my shift to no avail. He offered to replace it, but I wasn't about to shake an old man down for $$$ like that over an innocent mistake. https://www.flickr.com/photos/zombiegreen/2778476920/in/album-72157606829895847/
@Mr. Humphreys Remind me to walk around your neighbourhood more often! @blakewest I fully appreciate wanting to downsize collections, and especially having space requirements, but another solution is to hold on to, or mail out, the toy for one of the many raffles/donation drives we run regularly on the board. Things like Jame's fundraiser or JP's annual giveaway are great channels to give new life to toys which you may find just don't quite fit in with your tastes anymore. I also proposed a pass-it-along SB box of toy goodies way back when, but it died somewhere along the way unfortunately, similar to the [many] SB moleskins.
Years and years ago on my first trip to Japan I managed to pick up various sofubi pieces without being aware of the medium as a whole. One of these was the blank M1号 Hedorah set which came with a giant eyeball that I bought from Ichibanboshi. My luggage was something ridiculous and fool that I was - I didn’t realise I could get the two seperate eyeball halves to fit together by using a hairdryer. So I left the eyeball behind. Woops.
I’ve thought about throwing out stuff that doesn’t sell. Especially after someone tries to lowball the shit out of them, straight out of spite.
