I just returned from buying a collection! That makes for a good weekend. This one was really unusual because the guy was more of a patch hoarder than a patch collector in the classic sense.
This Weekend Is Loaded With Auctions
Most of us are checklist collectors. You know what you want and have eBay searches set up to ping you when those items hit. Not this guy! His "M.O." was driving to Scout offices on family vacations and buying out whatever they had. In this collection there are literally stacks of 50 event patches from multiple councils he visited over the years. Sadly many of those are council event patches but he was also looking for things that looked pretty.
I told the son (who I was buying the collection from) that this would only have made sense if you intended to then go and trade those patches and turn them into 50 different patches. He said his dad talked like that but never actually did it. The son basically said his dad was a hoarder and the extreme accumulation of patches was the collection not really any individual patch or particular focus.
So there are some OA patches in the collection but it's only about 10% of the total patches. There are some CSPs in there but maybe only 20% of the collection. Thankfully with eBay now removing any listing fees for our category I am just going to post everything for sale using the Scott Lane strategy. Scott posts activity patches for $5-$6 and just waits years for somebody to pop on it.
Tonight on eBay I have over 100 auctions ending from a nice OA collection I'm selling. This is part of 292 live auctions that are up right now on my eBay store.
One of the items that I got some dupes on in this collection is the classic 1997 reference book The Boy Scout Council Shoulder Patch Guide. This one is 92 pages long in full color. It tells the history and symbology that is represented on all the council shoulder patches of that era. I am selling them for $12 each with free shipping on my Shopify store.
My Boy Scout memorabilia store at www.ScoutPatchHQ.com is loaded with thousands of patches for sale with free shipping. At launch it features the collection of Marty Wasznicky "the Silverfox Trader" being sold on consignment. Inside you can find Order of the Arrow, National Jamboree and Council Shoulder Patches.
