Among friends

The book I didn't need, but Todd did

Half the fun of collecting is collecting with people. You end up knowing what your friends are chasing almost as well as what you are chasing yourself, right up until the moment you are standing in a shop three states away trying to remember whether Todd ever found that issue.

My friends' collections live in my app, in their own group, separate from mine. So when I turn up a beautiful copy of a book I already own, I search it and see at a glance that Todd's run has a hole exactly there. He gets a photo and a text before I have left the shop. He has done the same for me more times than I can count.

It works in the other direction too, and this is where it stops being a favor and starts being business. Someone asks me where they can find an issue. I search across everything I can see, my inventory and my friends' and clients' collections together, and I can tell them who has a copy, what grade it is in, and what it is listed at. A question I used to answer with "let me ask around" I now answer while they are still standing there.

The same mechanism is how I run consignments. A seller's books live in their own collection under Friends and Clients, plainly not mine. I can search them, price them, list them, and sell them, and when the money is counted, brokered sales total separately from my own. Their books never contaminate my numbers, and my numbers never flatter themselves with their books.

Behind it: a friend sends their collection the same way anything else is shared, and it arrives as a collection you can browse and search but which is never confused with your own. Sending a refreshed copy later updates the one you have rather than creating a second. Nothing syncs behind anyone's back: a collection arrives because its owner sent it. And books being evaluated are deliberately excluded from cross-collection search, so "do I own this?" can never be answered with somebody else's book.