Cash in the attic

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 at 10:45

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Gallery

The popular 'art' posters that used to decorate the bedroom walls of the masses are worth little or nothing, even if they do depict a blonde tennis player scratching her naked bum, but publicity posters for events and concerts can be highly collectable, depending on their rarity and condition. Good money can also be made from the sale of posters for political propaganda, movies, theatres, travel and transport. Visit Original Vintage Posters (www.originalvintageposters.co.uk) to see if your old posters make the top end of the market and how much they're worth, and AllPosters (www.allposters.co.uk) to check you're not handling a tacky reproduction.

You may also find buried treasure in a pile of old postcards, and there's a splendid price guide at www.postcard.co.uk. Surprisingly, most vintage cards are worth only a few pence, and portraits of old monarchs barely command the price of a pint, but a view of a pre-1950 railway station may fetch over 30 quid. If you think you've stumbled across something that may be worth a mint, you need to get an expert valuation. A genuine free service is offered by The Ten O'Clock Show (www.thetenoclockshow.co.uk), which also deals in cigarette cards, banknotes and stamps. Its online guide to the value of UK postage stamps is just about the best there is.

Size matters

Items such as stamps, postcards and concert programs can be sent to any buyer very cheaply though the post, unlike unwanted pianos and redundant garden statues. You will need to strike a balance between profitability and portability, because there's no point trying to sell something if the transportation cost is prohibitive - neither is there any point thinking that what's valuable to you will be valuable to anyone else. That ticket to Michael Jackson's last concert will never be worth more than a fraction of its face value because there were 800,000 printed. By the time there are only a few left - making them worth anything - both you and the King of Pop will be long forgotten. In other words, rarity is just as important as nostalgia.

Vinyl solution

Some of the most common space-hoggers cluttering up your attic space are likely to be old albums - not CDs, which we look at in our 'None of the above' box below, but those piles of vinyl LPs with their nostalgic covers and analogue evocations. More Music (www.moremusic.co.uk) is a good springboard for a huge number of resources to help you offload unwanted albums, but the chances are you'll end up at Gemm (www.gemm.com), where 30,000 other hopefuls are currently competing to sell. The main problem here is that many prices are wildly over-optimistic. Always take a median valuation, and don't get carried away by other people's pipe dreams.

If you think you may have some genuine rarities in your old record collection, there's a sure-fire way to get an accurate valuation, but it'll cost you 10 quid for a short subscription. The valuation database run by http://recordmaster.com has over 650,000 detailed listings for all grades of LPs, covers and inserts. They don't deal in bootlegs, and they deal only in US dollars, but you can take a free preview tour to see if their service suits you.