2001-07-20 - 11:25 p.m.

The Booby Bucket Brigade!

The big event that happened today was that I had a major Playboy buy-in.

I suppose I'm going to have to explain that sentence, aren't I?

My comic store, which takes up the first floor of the Hamster Palace, also sells back issues of Playboy magazine, and today I had an appointment with a fellow to buy a big lot of them.

I've been carrying Playboys for the better part of fifteen years, and it's been a really great profit center for me. Generally we buy them for a quarter or fifty cents apiece, and turn around and sell them for an average of four or five dollars. I know that sounds like a hell of a markup, but there are some issues that just sit and sit. Besides, if we paid any more for them, we'd soon be stocked to the rafters with old magazines. The last 25 years of Playboy are very, very common even though there are some individual issues that are hard to come by.

I think that Playboy is a fun magazine. It manages to be playful without being stupid, like some other magazines I could name. (*cough*Maxim*cough*)

I'm a subscriber and I have been for years. Of course it doesn't hurt that I can resell my subscription copies at full retail.

This may be hard to believe, but I really don't care that much about the pictures of naked girls. When the playmates started to be more than ten years younger than me, I started to lose interest - which is kind of funny considering my current living situation.

I just don't find the women featured there that interesting. It used to be that the Playboy Playmate was the "girl next door," the sort of person you might actually meet. (As if!) But for years that's only been true if you happened to live next door to a modeling agency. Lots and lots of Playmates are professional models. Also, the prevalence of fake boobs is a big turn-off for me. The thought of some young woman being cut up for cosmetic reasons gives me the willies.

One of the things that I admire most about Playboy is that they are big supporters of the First Amendment. The Playboy Foundation has spent millions of dollars on legal fees on hundreds of cases over the past few decades. While there is obviously a certain amount of self-interest in that, I still find it very admirable because I'm a big First Amendment supporter - anyone who writes should be.

Anyway, the guy selling the magazines was someone I had dealt with before, and he said that he'd be by today at 2 p.m. and darn it if he wasn't right on time.

I bounced downstairs and they were already unloading the guy's truck. He said that there were over 600 magazines, and it all was in seventeen heavy, heavy boxes. The guy, his assistant, the Manager and I formed a human chain, passing boxes from the truck to the store. As I was hefting boxes I thought: "Hey, it's the Booby Bucket Brigade!"

What was unusual about this is that usually I don't get involved with Playboy purchases - that's usually the Manager's job. However, this was so large, he needed me around to sign the check. He'd agreed to a price of 75 cents an issue, simply because there were so many magazines from the 60s and early 70s, an area where our supplies were rather thin.

However, the guy selling them to us was an antique dealer. Very early on in my business career I learned that it was wise to be very, very leery of antique dealers. My general opinion is that they'd haggle with you over the pennies on your dead mother's eyes. Dealing with them when they were trying to sell me comics was generally very difficult: since they were mainly rip-off artists, they assumed I was trying to rip them off, too. They always wanted way too much for any comics they had, which was funny considering that whenever they had any comics they'd picked them up gratis as part of some other deal.

Of course this is an overgeneralization. Some antique dealers are okay. The guy with the Playboys was one of the more tolerable of them. However, something to keep in mind is that these guys haggle over stuff for a living - they generally are pretty good at it.

When we buy Playboys we generally look through them quickly to make sure they are in decent shape. The most common defect: the centerfold is missing. Magazines with that kind of damage are utterly worthless and we throw them out. You just can't blow out Playboys in a bargain bin the way you can with comics. However, because there were so many books in this collection, we took them at face value. The guy said that he'd checked them and that they were in good shape.

However, after he left we discovered that he'd been too optimistic. A little less than ten percent of them were missing centerfolds, or had other serious defects. Out of about 560 magazines roughly 50 of them were bad. That's not too terrible a defect rate, but a lot of the bad ones were in the 60s, and they were the ones that we were really paying the premium for.

Oh well. Live and learn, I guess. I should have taken the time to spot check the early ones, and then renegotiated the buy price when I found all the bad ones. I don't feel too awful about it though, because I'll definitely make money on these things. It may take a while, though.