What started out as a miserable week actually turned around quite nicely. Earlier in the week I had a bit of a kerfuffle with an unethical dealer/auction house operating on SAN; I won't get into the details here, but the upshot is that I have asked them to remove me from their customer list and will not be doing business with them moving forward. In retrospect, it's a step I should have taken years ago rather than continuing to feed scoundrels.
So that experience put me in a rather dour mood. A couple of days later I called to check in with Denny Peoples since I hadn't spoken with him in several months, and he said "Hey, are you coming to the show this weekend?" I was like "Wait, what?... what's a stamp show?" Seriously though, the last show I went to was Chicagopex in November of 2019. They just haven't been on my radar at all, as other than a handful sprinkled across the country, they've all been canceled.
Well heck... I've had my COVID vaccinations, the money I had allocated to purchases from the shyster on SAN was now freed up, so why not?
So at 7AM on Saturday, I set off for Indianapolis, Indiana. The weather around here has been... well... weird. It was 41 degrees when I set out and by late afternoon in Indiana it was 76 degrees. From coat to shorts in a single day? #2021iscrazy
Previously, when I've gone to shows, even small ones, there typically would be a line of people waiting to get in by the time the show opened... not so much this time around. I guess people are still staying away. I got there a half hour early, and because they were doing temperature checks and there was a waiver to sign, I had to wait; Denny gave me a box of revenue stuff to hunt through out in the lobby while I waited. Until roughly 10 minutes before opening I was the only one there waiting. Two other collectors showed up as the show was opening. Not exactly beating down the doors.
The low traffic continued seemingly most of the day. Most of the business was dealer-to-dealer. When dealers get bored the humor comes out. Listening to Denny and Rusty Shoaf kvetching back and forth across the room was entertaining.
I spent quite a bit of time with AAA Stamp & Coin (Marc Achterhoff) and bought a fair amount from their 75%-off box. He and his wife reminisced with me about a local collector in my town that they knew who recently passed away. I had no idea that Marc is almost 80 years old; I wouldn't have put him anywhere near that age. About the nicest guy you'll ever meet.
I spent some time with Scott @ Tiger Collectibles. I had high hopes given what I've bought from him before, but unfortunately not much had been replenished (or had been added and sold) since I saw him last, so I just bought a tiny lot of 20th century Future Delivery cards.
There were several dealers I had not seen before, but unfortunately they didn't really have much for me. There was one dealer who was dedicated to Civil War material of all kinds (stamps, covers, ephemera, medals, antiques)... but sadly only Confederate material, no revenue stuff for me.
There was a dealer who had traveled from Washington, DC that I felt badly for given the distance he had traveled, as by mid-afternoon my $58 purchase had been his largest sale by that point in the day. Ouch.
There was another dealer I had not seen before that was... well... just annoying. His stock was seemingly random in organization, and his method was for you to look things up on computer-generated lists and he would get/find them for you. Well.. for someone who collects aesthetically (cancels, color shades, plate varieties), rather than being an album spot filler, this approach is useless. I ended up wasting far too much time for absolutely zero benefit.
One aspect of 2021 that several dealers were upset about is the compression of shows into the end of this year. Denny mentioned 6 WSP shows within a 2-month timespan, which leaves ZERO opportunity for dealers to replenish their stock between shows. This doesn't necessarily bode well for me, as the next show I'll be going to is Chicagopex in November, assuming it is held. The pickings may be slim.
Even though I didn't find much from most of the dealers, I scored a few very nice plate variety cherrypicks (one fairly pricey one) and a couple unusual cancels I've not seen before, one of which I'll have to run through RetroReveal to obtain a better picture of.
As is typically the case, I spent overall much more time at Denny's table than anyone else's. He was my first stop there and my last stop before leaving, and I spent 10x with him than I did with any other dealer. A couple of large-format documents, some illegal/improper usages, several great aesthetic documents, and for giggles a couple of cheap bankers-box carton lots of world stamps. Denny's box lots are a delight; you never know what you'll find.
The irony of it all... two of the documents I bought from Denny were types I had won from [CENSORED] on SAN... but at a lower cost. That gave me warm fuzzies all the way home.
Posted 03/29/2021 5:19 pm
