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An article several months ago discussed Brummagem--"The Toughest Issue in the Hobby." This month we tackle another tough issue--How do we know what a button is worth?
One way is to consult a price guide. Several are available. One favorite in the hobby is Ted Hake's three-volume Encyclopedia of Political Buttons. A handier volume is the slender Price Guide to Presidential Campaign Collectibles by the same author. There are also specialized guides such as Bob Warren's Political Tabs: A Vanishing Breed, which gives a narrow range of prices for each listed tab, and Price Guide to Collectible Pinback Buttons, which gives a range of prices for advertising, labor, and other categories of buttons.
Of course, if we're going to trust these price guides, we have a right to ask how they were assembled. Ted Hake's three-volume Encyclopedia involved a massive survey of many of the hobby's major dealers, asking their opinion of the value of thousands of items. The prices listed in this guide are an average of the various dealers' estimates. Some price guides are simply based on the one author's own expertise, and perhaps his own survey of prices at auctions and at collectibles shows. This is the case, for example, with Hake's Price Guide to Presidential Campaign Collectibles and with Bob Warren's Political Tabs: A Vanishing Breed.
One problem with the prices listed in printed guidebooks is that they are out of date almost the minute the hit the book stores, if not before. Hake's three-volume Encyclopedia, for example, was published beginning in 1974. One should never, never use the prices printed in the Encyclopedia itself, as they are many years out of date. These prices should not even be used to estimate relative values of one button over another, since in the years since the Encyclopedia was first printed, certain types of buttons have increased in value more quickly than others, and also new caches of buttons have sometimes been discovered, bringing prices down for some designs.
Fortunately, the out-of-date qualities of price guides can be lessened by the issue of regular supplements. Ted Hake issued one price update to his Encyclopedia in 1984, and another in 1991. The 1991 update is considered the single most important price reference in the hobby, but note that even still these prices are six years out of date. Most items have appreciated in value since 1991, some faster than others. It takes a certain amount of experience to use the 1991 update, since prices in the update generally need to be moved upward, sharply in the hobby's "hot" areas, and very modestly in some of the hobby's flat areas. For a few button designs, especially where new supplies have been discovered, the prices in the 1991 update should be moved downward.
[Editor's Note: Remember that this is a backfile article! Actually a new Hake price update was issued in 1998.]
If price guides do have some problems, such as timeliness, maybe another way to estimate values would be to rely on the records of auctions. What better way to determine an item's value than to offer that item to every collector in the country, and see what it brings? At a large auction like the one held every two years at the APIC national convention, nearly every dealer in the hobby, and a large number of the serious collectors, are present, or else bidding by mail. Wouldn't the price realized for a certain button at this major auction be a good indication of its value? The answer is, Yes and No.
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Take the Stevenson litho jugate above. We could determine its value by looking in the 1991 update to Hake's Encyclopedia (where, it turns out, the estimated value is $50). Yet if the button sells for $72 at the APIC national convention auction, why shouldn't we say that $72 is the button's current value? Well, there are two ways of looking at this:
So in this case maybe the price guide is a better indicator of value than the one auction sales record. But what if you surveyed the results of a number of auctions, and perhaps inquired among the non-auction dealers what their sales records showed? By looking at dozens of sales records and averaging them, wouldn't you get a fair indication of the button's value? Perhaps, but we still must remember that the high price at an auction was the price one collector was willing to pay, and we need to remember too that at auctions especially, people sometimes get carried away.
Yet it may not be true that the Price Guides are the invariably calm, sober, and highly accurate tools we wish they were. Consider the McKinley Full Dinner Pail button that appears on the masthead of every issue of Buttons and Ballots. It is a 1900 celluloid that comes in several sizes and varieties, but let's consider the one pictured here, a blue 1.25 inch cello.
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This button appears in volume I of Hake's Encyclopedia of Political Buttons as item MAC-39, and is valued in the 1991 update at $100. Is $100 an accurate reflection of the button's current value? I admit I have already prejudged the issue, since I know that at political shows I never see this button offered for as little as $100 or even $110. But let's look at the auction records. I looked at every catalog in my collection issued by the two biggest auctioneers in the hobby, and at the prices realized sheets. I own a total of 45 catalogs from these two dealers, dated 1990 to the present. I checked every record of a sale of the button pictured above, looking only at buttons in excellent condition. These catalogs included one sale from the APIC National Convention.
Here are the prices this button brought: $130, 133, 128, 121, 121, 145, 168, 133, 138, 190, 124, 128, 170, 145, 121, 121, 117, 110, 127, 126, 131, and 121. So on one occasion this button sold for $190, almost twice the value given in Hake's Encyclopedia. Still, this one sale of $190 is probably a case of bidders getting carried away. Yet what is surprising is that not one example of this button in excellent condition has sold for less than $110 in a six year span at the hobby's two biggest auction houses. The average sale price was $134, or 34% above the so-called book value.
The full dinner pail McKinley jugate is a nice button. As a dealer, I wish I had ten copies I could sell at the "book price" of $100. I suspect they would sell quickly and easily. As it is, I'm sorry to say that it's unlikely I'll be able to find even one copy in excellent condition I could sell at $100, at least in the near future. It's impossible to say what prices this button will be bringing in 1999 or 2001.
In short, price guides are an invaluable help, but should not be viewed as some kind of inviolable gospel. Prices of buttons tend to change over time, and current trends may mean that a certain button is currently selling at more or less than the price given in the price guides. The best way to keep current on prices in the hobby is to look at price guides, at fixed priced sales lists and ads in hobby publications, at auction catalogs and the market reports in the Polticial Bandwagon and the Political Collector, and to attend collectibles shows and note the prices there. Most