Selling a collection ?

The BHGS are regularly contacted by people who are looking to find a new home for a collection of wargames figures that they have inherited from a loved one who has recently passed away. 

There are unfortunately quite a lot of collections coming onto the market at the moment - the demographics of the historical wargamer community are such that a number of the older older players and collectors are now passing away, and so we do get requests to help value items on a fairly frequent basis. 

This is not something we as an organisation are set up or resourced to so unfortunately, however as a general guide there are a number of challenges in doing so:

• The value of collections is generally declining as more are put up for sale,
• Many of the older figures that parents/grandparents/spouses may have had in their collections have often now been superseded by newer, better designed ranges, so demand for older figures is often very limited,
• Historical wargaming is a collection of many different niche areas, and so very few gamers will have the same set of specific interests or breadth of experience as your loved one - meaning that large parts of any given collection may be just as much a mystery to someone "in the hobby" as they are to you!
• Most significantly, the task of sorting out a collection to identify "which bits are which", (and which might have value) is often an enormous and thankless task, as many wargamers were not careful cataloguers of their purchases. 

At the end of the day each piece in a collection essentially has a value of "whatever someone will pay for it on eBay", so every piece may be different - so all in all it becomes almost impossible to look at a collection, or even suggest someone who would be able to help sort and value a collection in a granular manner. 

What we can however suggest is that you may wish to contact some of the companies who do pick up entire collections, and see if they would be interested in taking it off your hands as a job lot.

The main ones we are aware of are:

• Hinds Figures - https://hindsfiguresltd.com/We-Buy-Figures.html
• Colonel Bills - https://www.colonelbills-store.co.uk/faqs
• Rob Palmier - [email protected]
• York Military Books - [email protected]

All of these folks may well come and have a look at a collection and, if it's to a standard they think they can resell, they will give you a "take it off your hands" offer and then take it all away. 

The other option is to contact a local club and see if anyone there is interested in taking a look - it may be that they will make offers for some parts of the collection. We have a list of clubs on our website, so you may be able to find one near you. 

We hope that is useful, and apologies in advance that we can't be of more assistance. 

Kind regards

The BHGS