In my current e-mail club message, I gave APF & Mel's site a
MAJOR plug to the 7,890 poster collectors who are members! Here's hoping it results in increased traffic for Mel's site and a bunch of new members here.
If you aren't a member, go to
https://www.emovieposter.com/club/settings.php to join (it is free, and you get ONE email a week from us, and being on our e-mail list can
NOT generate other e-mails to you, because we respect your privacy and we do not ever trade, rent or sell email addresses and you can "unsubcribe" any time.
Here is what I wrote:
Did you know how you can educate yourself on how to tell originals from reproductions? There are many people who start collecting without thinking about how to learn to not buy reproductions as originals (and to avoid being cheated in this way), and only later do they realize that they likely purchased at least a few reproductions as originals, and it is far too late to get their money back on those, so they sometimes take a considerable loss.
Here are some helpful tips on how best to protect yourself (and these will make you a far better "educated" collector, and the education will spread far beyond just telling originals from reproductions!
But first and foremost, you want to educate yourself about how to tell originals from repros, because this is where you can
REALLY get taken for lots of money. A really good site to start with is
http://www.moviepostercollectors.com/Authentications.html. The owner of the site, Mel Hutson (or Dread Pirate Mel on forums!) is a dedicated collector who has put a massive amount of effort into trying to find differences between originals and reproductions and he is a very nice guy who wants to help everyone else out (for free) and he puts what he finds on the above site as a "authentication", and he includes images of both the real and the fake poster, with helpful tips on how to tell them apart.
There are also many other sites on the Internet that contain a lot of information, but few of them have an easy to find major section on authenticating posters, so you have to go on each site and then find the portion of it that relates to this subject. You will also find much helpful information in our past e-mail club messages, which can be found on our website at
https://www.emovieposter.com/club/archive.php (Note: You have to be registered for our auctions to view the current or past club messages). We even have a search that lets you search all 628+ past messages!
Another good way to learn more about movie posters is to visit
http://www.learnaboutmovieposters.com. This is a
MASSIVE site with so much information that you couldn't read it all in a year! But explore the site and you will surely become a much more educated collector.
You also might consider going to one or more of the movie poster forums on the Internet. The best one (in our opinion) is
http://www.allposterforum.com/. They have a large section solely devoted to Authentication. You can join the forums and ask questions, or you can simply be a "lurker" and read everyone else's posts anonymously without ever contributing!
Finally, the most important thing is that you purchase your posters from people who stand behind them! We at eMoviePoster.com have far and away the strongest policy on buyer protection. We have no time limit on our guarantees &
NO buyer beware on
ANYTHING we sell. We are the only auction we know of who offers refunds for mistakes even
YEARS after the fact, and we are also the only one we know of who tracks down the buyers when we find any sort of mistake and doesn't wait for them to discover the mistake themselves!
Other auctions have their own policies on what they guarantee. Many of them do not guarantee
ANYTHING. They have "buyer beware", which means that all sales are final, even if something proves to be a fake. Some auctions (and many dealers) may allow returns for some short period of time, but there are likely many conditions attached to that, and you want to find out from each seller you deal with how they guarantee what they sell, because it will vary greatly from auction to auction and from dealer to dealer.
In general, you certainly need to be cautious. If some deals seems "too good to be true", then they probably are! There are some long time eBay sellers who are notorious for selling fakes as originals (they mix in the fakes with real posters, to better fool newer collectors), and yet they have very high feedback with few bad ones (because they get eBay to remove the negatives, which eBay does, because they make lots of money from these sellers).
So if you are a relatively newer collector, then just keep educating yourself about our hobby by following the above suggestions, and over time you will learn more and more until you will feel you are an educated collector, and I promise you that this will be time well spent, because doing so will greatly help you avoid making costly errors in your collecting.
And remember that you can
ALWAYS contact us if you have any question about any area of collecting, and we will surely reply to you. We don't take out giant ads and we don't print giant catalogs, and we use the money we save on those things to provide quality customer service to not only our customers, but also to all collectors!
