Bruce posted this on his Facebook page a few hours ago:
"MISSION IMPOSSIBLE! Just four weeks ago, a very long time collector approached me with an offer. He would bring my auction house, eMoviePoster.com, approximately 20,000 items to auction, but ONLY if I would immediately make a special auction of his "better" 545 linenbacked posters, and only if I would commit to auctioning the best of the rest of his items over the next 10 weeks. I asked when he wanted to bring the items, and he said in TWO DAYS!
I assembled my top people and we decided it was "do-able", and so I told the consignor we would do it, but with two important conditions:
1) Every item had to be honestly described, with no glossing over defects or using images that hid defects. Some posters would be described as being in "poor" or "fair" condition, and the consignor had to be able to live with this.
2) Every item had to TRULY have no reserve and start at $1 (as all our auctions do). This would guarantee that there WOULD be some items that would sell for far under what they might retail for, but there would be compensating high results, and the consignor had to be able to live with this.
The consignor agreed, and brought the 20,000 items by truck two days later. When he arrived, I took him on a tour of our facility, showing exactly HOW we are able to hold 2,500 unique auctions every WEEK, and when we were done 30 minutes later, his truck was entirely unloaded, and he was on his way!
We held the special auction of the 545 linenbacked posters last week, and it took in just under $250,000. For the next day, you can see EVERY one of those results (with images, condition grades, selling prices and buyer IDs) in a single gallery here:
http://www.emovieposter.com/agallery/sort/4/results.html (after tomorrow, they will move to individual results galleries for each of the three parts).
This auction contained 137 great posters from the 1930s, and you can see just those here:
http://www.emovieposter.com/…/tag/decade%253A1…/results.html
The auction was a major success, highlighted by the $50,388 paid for a six-sheet from The Iron Horse, with many high prices, but also (as predicted) with several wonderful buys at low prices (and these were all really purchased by collectors and dealers, and were NOT secretly "bought in" as happens at some many auctions).
There is NO other auction house in the world that could have made this happen in such a short period of time (four weeks from arrival to all sold!), and the auctions went off without a hitch. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
It could not have happened without the concerted efforts of EVERY one of our employees, and such unprecedented success under such trying conditions on the part of our employees deserved an unprecedented response on my part, and on Friday, I gave EVERY one of our 32 employees a raise!"
