starscape wrote:I can also appreciate someone is doing this for posterity (although it depends what happens with the collection - poor old Denis Gifford being a case in point)
I'm assuming, starscape, that you would have wanted the whole of Denis's collection to be displayed somewhere, perhaps in a kind of living museum, in order to give other comics enthusiasts the opportunity to browse through them. The trouble is that we don't live in the ideal world that would be required. The collection was worth, and fetched, a huge amount of money, presumably for his heirs. Furthermore, looking through the ten catalogues produced by Hamer Auctions, in which every one of the 4241 lots had belonged to Denis (the ones with coloured front and rear covers), I've come to the conclusion that just trying to organise them into meaningful categories would have been a mindbender. Then of course there is the vexed question of where the displays would be sited. There were also five further auction catalogues (black and white covers) that were basically advertising Martin Hamer's items for sale, with a section at the beginning or the end for the fag end of Denis's, adding about 1040 other items to the 4241, so roughly 5280 items altogether.
Obviously I can't speak for Ray but I very much doubt whether my lads, who both work several hours travel from my home, one in London, the other in Cornwall, will feel a philanthropic urge when I kick the bucket. They will be pragmatic and get on the phone to Phil Shrimpton and tell him that if he wants to make a few bob in commission he should get his arse up the M6 tout de suite, and, as one of my French teachers regularly used to say, usually when handing me a sheet of foolscap to write my lines on,
the touter the sweeter.
