To better help incidental sellers of antique/used magazines assess what their item is worth, here is a guideline based on a specific example question posed to us (we are one of the major antique magazine sellers on the Internet.):

QUESTION BY SELLER:

What is my Woman's Home Companion from July 1929 worth?

ANSWER BY US:

Before we answer your specific question, I will first describe below how the process of appraising the value of a magazine works.

THE PROCESS OF MAGAZINE VALUE APPRAISAL

Your magazine's value is dependent on:
a. Condition grading
b. Demand marketing

Explanation:
a. The condition of a magazine is assessed accurately and comprehensively by looking at two condition aspects:
- The detailed condition and
- The general condition grading.
First, condition graders will determine the condition of the three main components of a magazine, being covers, spine and pages. If any of these components are seriously damaged or missing, this will (in general) seriously affect their condition assessment of each magazine component. Examples of serious damage are: page water damage, complete spine loss, page brittleness, page staining, page perforations.

Next, condition graders will add up the results of all separate condition issues, assign the condition of each of three components a weighted value and establish the sum of these three values and determine and average condition value. That average condition value is called the 'general condition grading'.

Common usage is that the 'general condition grading' gets talked about on a predetermined scale, either numeric or alphanumeric, from highest (best condition) to lowest (worst condition).

Examples of such a numeric scale for 'general condition grading' are 1 to 10, or 1 to 5. Examples of an alphanumeric 'general condition grading' scale are Mint to Poor, or Excellent copy to Reading copy. At this moment there is still no objective standardized 'general condition grading' scale in our industry of antique magazines (we are working on one, which is called Scroll Scores (TM)).

b. The demand marketing for your magazines is determined by
- the quantity of copies of your item that are known to be available in the market
- the degree that the magazine and the content of the magazine is made visible to the market (=the potential buyers)
- the reasonable pricing based on historical transaction data.

The more of the same magazine appears online, the more the prices for that magazine will encounter a downward trend.

However, the more a magazine seller discloses about the magazine's content (as well as its condition), the higher prices are reached for that magazine.

Our proprietary database Papyria (TM) with such complete content summaries (not just Table of Contents, but much more complete) and also containing historic sales data for magazines, allows us to maximize the prices that way.

The historic sales data are important to determine a reasonable price, to see what the market can bear. Setting excessive prices will result in no sales and depress value and setting too low prices will do the same.

Of course such extra marketing efforts to maximize demand, thus price, are only worthwhile if selling on a large scale. Incidental sellers will fetch the lowest prices, so the lowest values, since they can often not afford the extra marketing efforts, without losing on the sale.

SUMMARY: So a condition grading and a plan for marketing to create demand for a magazine, will determine the price you fetch (aka Value).

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ADVICE ON YOUR SPECIFIC MAGAZINE: For your specific Woman's Home Companion from July 1927 magazine, assuming that it is at least gradable with a 'general condition grading' of 7 (or Very Good) and you would publish it on a major online venue, where it would be highly visible, without any content summary description, would fetch by our estimation a base price between $5 and $10. If you describe its content in a complete summary, including names of articles, photos, illustrations, authors, illustrators, advertisers, advertised products etc., you would fetch an extra $10 to $15 (sometimes even higher) over the mentioned base price.