ME's ? What value ?

Obviously not a lot.

Stuck a vast shed load on Ebay earlier in the week and finishes in a bit and so far one bid of 99p

Not too bothered, need to get rid but does make a farce of all the listed adverts where they want £100's of pounds.

**LINK**

... but do they sell for 100s of pounds?

I would never put a job lot of something on EBay. Always split into small lots or individual issues. More work but more money.

The trouble with that approach, David, is that individual issues of ME are not really worth much to most people because of the long, multi-part articles. The exception is the person who needs a single (or few) issues to fill in holes in his collection - that person might be willing to pay considerably over the odds - but how many of those are you likely to hit.

A bidder might target 20 consecutive issues but he would be taking a risk on getting outbid for one or more of them.

When Gert MKI was alive she used to sort out all the copies and list as volumes. Average volume price was about £4.00 - £4.50 but now Ebay make you build in postage in the cost for books and magazines it wasn't worth it given the amount of time involved.

This little lot took me the best end of two hours to remove from a storage shed [ space desperately needed ] to where they could be photographed and listed, probably another hour. So even at this I was working for £3 per hour and any more would have seriously reduced this.

I'm currently producing an item with Gert MKII that costs under a pound to produce and sells for £15.

I know what I'd sooner be doing.

Three or 4 years ago I sold my set of ME's, again space needed. They went from 1940 to 2000 with no gaps.

They made £67.00

MEW's still hold a price, see them on Ebay for about £4.50 an issue post paid on average, earlier ones can make far more in an auction and storage isn't a problem with them being single issues.

Probably got about 700 on stock.

Edited By John Stevenson on 14/10/2015 21:51:06

Until relatively recently, MEW had few, if any, multi-part articles so individual copies were useful.

.

Jason,

Therein lies evidence of the long-estabished ME 'Marketing Model'

Why would they be interested in maintaining the value of secondhand copies ?

... Publish a long series, in alternate issues, and you get Subscribers !!

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 15/10/2015 09:11:10

I sold the first 30 issues of MEW for well over £200 a few years ago when issues 1-10 fetched really high prices. This was before the digital archive was available and the prices probably fell after that. I also tried to sell about 200 copies of ME in a job lot at the same time but got no bidders and ended up dumping them in the local skip.

Doug

Hi Douglas I also sold the first 30 copies before the digital archive. Again for about £200 but the buyer also paid about £130 for postage to the USA. The trouble withe older versions of Model Engineer was the huge amount of them printed.

I work hard to make sure that each issue of MEW has plenty of 'complete' content.

The proportion of multi-part articles (and the length of them) has been greatly reduced. They are now rarely more than 3 instalments and I try to keep them to no more than about 1/3 of each issue's content.

Bear in mind that the publishers don't make anything from secondhand sales (except when they convince someone it's worth buying new copies!) and the main proportion of readers are subscribers who have no problems with series.

Neil