The phone call

“Do you buy collections? I'm about an hour away.”

Every store gets this call. Somebody inherited a collection, or is finally clearing out the garage, and they want to know if I buy. They can't tell me what's in it beyond “a lot of stuff from the 80s, some of them are bagged,” and they live an hour away. Without an inventory, that call used to have exactly two endings, both bad. I turn them away, and maybe wave off the best collection to come through all year. Or I play the lottery: two hours of driving to dig through boxes that are usually reading copies, or worse, an offer made blind. “Do I feel lucky?” is not a business plan.

Now the call has a third ending. I tell them: install Too Many Comics, walk your boxes with the camera, one photo per cover, and the app works out what each book is as you go. When you're done, email me the collection straight from the app. A twenty-minute phone call becomes an evening of their time instead of a day of mine, and nobody has driven anywhere yet.

The seller gets something real out of that evening too, and it makes the eventual negotiation easier, not harder. The app's estimates are grounded in the grade, and that does a kind but necessary service: the key issue they heard sells for $15,000 sells for that in near-mint, and their copy, loved half to death, gets priced like the Good it is. When we finally talk numbers, we're both standing in the same reality, and neither of us is the villain who broke the news.

The email lands and the collection opens in my app: every cover, every grade, searchable, sitting in its own collection that never mixes with my inventory. I review it from my desk with coffee instead of from a garage floor. A little run of Star Wars catches my eye, and I know exactly who chases those, so I send him the details. A few calls like that and something quietly great has happened: I have preliminary agreements to sell enough of the collection to cover what I'm comfortable offering for the whole thing, before I've spent a dollar or turned a key in the ignition.

And that leaves the interesting part: the few books I'd be keeping. One is recorded as Good, but when I zoom in on the cover photo, the wear reads like the kind that cleans up: a good clean and press could plausibly bring it to Very Fine. At Very Fine it's worth sending off for professional grading, and if I'm right, that one slab is a home run hiding inside a garage collection an hour up the road.

Behind it: the seller scans with the same app and the same AI cover identification everyone uses; no expertise needed on their end. The emailed collection rides the app's share format and arrives under Friends and Clients: browsable and searchable, cover photos included and zoomable, and never confused with your own inventory. Grade-based estimates come from the same Ballpark pricing, so both sides of the deal are looking at numbers built the same way.