So, to revisit this...I did it. I was able to sell off a different collection of items I had been sitting on for a few years and raise the $500. $500 isn't a lot to some of you, I'm sure, it's a fair sum for me.
Anyway. I set up the deal to pick up the poster sunday morning. Drive two hours to my hometown sunday morning, the theater owner isn't there. No one is there. Message him. He gets back to me about 20 minutes later, says he'll send one of his lackeys down. Meanwhile, I'm left loitering in front of the closed movie theater, at 11 am on a sunday morning, in a suspicious small town. She shows up about 10 minutes later.
We go to the front of the theater, into this area behind the screen. There were about 10 boxes of posters, I'd conservatively guess about 250 tubes. Also behind the screen, is every piece of junk that has been worn out, broken or discarded by the theater since about 1980, judging by the enormity of it. This theater used to be a Vaudeville house until the mid 1930's when it was converted to a movie house by Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.
Anyway, this girl and her husband start bringing the boxes out the backdoor of the building and I back my car right up to it and start piling tubes into the trunk. With the trunk full, I started putting stuff in the back seat, including what appears to be 20 4x6 bus shelters.
With my entire car packed full, trunk, backseat, passenger front seat, I make the two hour return trip home. My wife and I unload this into the basement and start going through it.
The results of the inventory are not promising.
No Marvel, DC, Pirates or anything that is really desirable. Nothing older than earlier 2000's and there weren't very many of them. One of the few bright spots of this is that anything there is any value in, there were two of, almost every time. Many have minor damage; a folded corner, a pin hole, edge wear from being displayed.
So while this may not be end up being a profitable venture, I'm pleased with the posters I gained for my own collection. I'd venture to guess there were upwards of 600 posters. My basement looks like an organized bomb went off, there are empty tubes everywhere, trash posters (severely damaged) in one pile, the "for sale" posters re-tubed over here, the ones I'm keeping over there. We spent about 10 hours sorting, collating and inventorying (is that a word?) all these posters. By the time we were done, my feet were on fire, my back hurt and I was to the point where I didn't want to see another poster, and I still had about 20 ebay auctions to pack up that had ended over the weekend.
