Selling on ebay began for me with a chest of drawers full of ephemera collected from ten different estates sales and I am headed toward retirement on a fast track now thanks to a little practice and a patient eye for the hidden treasures at estate sales.  The purpose of this guide is to help you understand that not all items you purchase for re-sale have to be large and carry a hefty price tag. You can minimize your purchases and maximize your selling power with just a little practice and by learning about local ephemera.

Usually, because it is small, paper items, vintage ephemera and advertising items are kept near the estate sale collection desk, either in the same room or by the clerk.  I have found this to be very helpful because it gives you the opportunity to visit with the people who have put together the sale. I usually ask about the owner of the estate, what special interest this owner had and even if there are some paper items they didn't put out because they didn't know how to price the items. From this curiosity, I have been given boxes full of paper to search for just pennies for the piece or even a box lot price. If I do a little work for the estate sale curators, they always seem to be very fair about pricing items in bulk.

Another place for paper items is often out in a storage shed or a garage. Usually at an estate sale, these items are put in as bag full or box full of items.  Take a minute, sit down on a box or even out in the driveway if weather is permitting and search through your box.  I don't recommend buying an entire box of paper if majority of it will later be thrown away. Searching through your box, look for letterheads, cancelled checks of banks no longer in business, programs from school programs, football programs, even ladies bridge tallies that are thrown into the box because of the writing. Make sure the items you like in the box will help you double or triple your purchase price, everything else just increases your sales profit. Take a few minutes and look at the pieces put into a "bagful of bargains" and make sure you will get at least one or two things in that sack that will let you double or triple your purchase price. Everything else in the box or bag is just gravy and we all love gravy !

Magazines should never be discounted because they are an off subject. While you may not have any interest in the arts and crafts projects of the 1950's, there is always a collector. Our booth in the antique mall is proof positive there should always be something for everyone in your booth or for you to sell on ebay. One of the most popular sales we make are on magazines containing vintage patterns for dolls and those wonderful sock monkeys every child had in the 50's.  Often you can pick up a stack of magazines for less than $1.00 per magazine, sometimes at 10 cents a magazine.  Once again, stop and think before you lug home 100 magazines, are there enough magazines of value in there to warrant the price and now the sweat involved in loading those items. Many people make the mistake of buying vintage magazines because they think they can earn money from the advertising. Make sure your advertising in those magazines are in color, or even still there. Black and white advertising is only good if it is from a magazine of the early 1900's and is a speciality. While everyone collects something, advertising collectors get pretty particular about their ads and how they are handled. We have found it better to just sell the magazine intact and let the ad collector find his treasure from our magazine.

Football programs, high school drama programs, programs from events, opera, broadway, shows any type of program has been extremely successful for us. If you list on ebay , put that program by the name of the town first and then the event. We are always in contact with people wanting some little something from their hometown.  One lady was desperate for anything from her high school, she had been through a horrendous fire and she was trying to re-create her memory books. Remember we are a very mobile society and people are always needing one more little item for their collection.

Calendars are nice, but not the greatest of sellers unless they are very specific. A good example of this is an auction we just completed.   The fact that it was a Hummel calendar and printed in Germany made it a great seller for us. Of course, complete vintage calendars are wonderful but these can be very pricey at estate sales. One thing that is extremely successful in the calendar groups are small and complete pocket calendar. One year we gave everyone in our family a pocket calendar from the year they were born. We did lots of searching at sales and on ebay until we had one for everyone.

Avoid dirty paper, no matter how cheap it is, you can't wash paper and once you have spent your money, all you have is dirty paper.  Water is the kiss of death to any form of paper, except victorian trade cards. Those can be put in warm water and soaked to get them off paper, but that is another article altogether !  Sometimes we have been given boxes of paper if we will just take them away from the sale and for the first few times we thought - hey, hey, what a deal. Then we learned we had a box of dirty paper and all we were doing if filling up our trash cans with free boxes of dirty paper. Paper that has little bugs will be paper with little bugs at your house. Basically, if you  hold it and touch it and you get dirty, or it crumbles, all you have there is dirty paper.

Look for paper that still has a clean line, clean look and most of all is clean. Many estate sales will take the time to put paper in plastic bags, to keep them clean during the sale. This means care has been given but it doesn't necessarily mean a high price on the item. We have seen people pay way too much for paper items because they were in those nice plastic bags. You want the items to be clean but it doesn't mean they have to be inside a protective seal. We have found some wonderful paper, stacked neatly in a box and nothing was covered. Often mid-century teacher's supplies are some of the greatest finds becaues that era had bright colors, die-cut lines and a good cardstock as the printable service.

We haven't talked about paper at garage sales or trade fairs or even at large flea markets. Paper is everywhere, it last well past the usually life of many other antique or vintage items and its easily transportable. If you want to find a niche that seems to catch everyone's interest, look for the paper at estate sales, a little hidden treasure.