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Buyers who were not especially knowledgeable generally bought at
retail stores.
Conventions catered mainly to dealers who bought on the
wholesale level and to serious or knowledgeable collectors who
sought the best bargains. During this period, the same
individual would very often participate in the convention market
as both dealer and collector. Dealers and collectors would pore
through stacks of obscure titles of poorly regarded films (known
as “schlock”), looking for the rare bargain that could then be
resold in a retail store or through a catalog. Movie memorabilia
conventions were mixed wholesale-retail markets, although tending
to be more wholesale than retail. Some categories of movie
memorabilia, such as twenty-four-sheets, six-sheets, and foreign
posters were rarely sold at conventions in the mid-1980's.
Three-sheets were sold only in small quantities at conventions in
1985 and generally commanded relatively low prices--$1 or $2 per
item.
e. The Collection
The collection donated to AMMI in December 1985 consisted of
7,378 items, including 546 duplicates, of movie memorabilia from
659 different films. The 546 duplicate items (nonaccessioned
inventory) were not assigned accession numbers by the museum.
The exact number of items in each category is shown in Table 1 in
the appendix, based upon an inventory conducted by AMMI in
December 1994. Most of the titles in the collection were of
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