A Hollywood memorabilia company, Piece of the Past, which is run by a long time collector and dealer named Kevin Martin, is holding a Star Trek auction next week. Kevin also runs The Hollywood Show, a major Hollywood autograph show and has been in the business a long time (He did one of the last private autograph signings with Ricardo Montalban).The Star Trek auction is the collection of a private collector who has been buying at Christie's and Butterfield's auctions through the 1990's. And while most items have a Chirstie's tag on them, they are not from the 2006 Christie's Star Trek auction, but from various Christie's Hollywood Memorabilia auctions before then.
I visited Kevin at his office in Murrieta, CA (out by Lake Elsinore) and inspected all the pieces. Kevin is no newbie to Star Trek props & costumes, having worked with Paramount in the 1990s and sold many Star Trek items Paramount sold him then. This was all news to me, but very interesting to know.
So a few things about the auction:
1) The software isn't bad. It is not Live Auctioneer or iCollector, but I have no problems trusting it. It seems to work well.
2) The auctions all end at the same time. Kevin said he always does his auctions this way, but let's face it, it is not the way to run an online auction. I have been in the auction industry online since 1999, and I can tell you you WANT people to be able to bid on items at the last moment.
3) There is a 15% Buyer's Premium, which is very reasonable.
4) Unfortunately you can't enlarge the pictures, so that is disappointing.
5) The policies are not up on the site and I have told Kevin this, so they are changing it.
There will be more info up every day, so please keep checking back.
Kevin Martin's bio from his site:
Kevin Martin is one of, if not the most respected autograph and memorabilia dealers in the world. He is also one of the leading celebrity autograph authenticators in the industry. Besides his over 20 years of experience, he has published dozens of features in Collecting magazine, Autograph Collector Magazine's long-running column "Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries" and many other publications including Movie Collector World, Big Reel, The Robb Report, Antiques and Collecting, and more. Kevin Martin is also the author of several books including the standard yearly price guide The Official Autograph Collector Price Guide, as well as The Autograph Collector Guide to Authentication, and Signatures of the Stars. You may have also seen him on the longest-running autograph show in television history called "Showbiz Collectibles" on the Video Catalog Channel.