Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines

Copyright © 2005 Avril Harper


For the past few years I've been tearing up old books and
magazines, and selling them on eBay. Other people's "rubbish"
is earning me $20 a time - sometimes a great deal more - every
single day!

It's an easy business and items other people throw away can
attract fierce bidding and incredible profits for me and other
lucky sellers.

We're selling prints and advertisements, crochet and woodworking
patterns, recipe books and other niche market publications,
alongside hundreds more totally different items, all taken from
books, magazines and newspapers that are available in profusion
and cost very little.

Let's start with old prints, they're incredibly good sellers,
especially popular themes like: animals, sports (especially golf
and horse racing), royalty, music hall artists, topographical
(named locations) and children.

Very early magazines contained lots of prints, the best being
Illustrated London News, The Graphic, Sketch, Sphere, and all
you do is remove prints carefully, trim the rough edges,
package to protect and make them more attractive, then list
them on eBay. These tips will help you get started in this
hugely profitable business:

* Frame your prints for extra add-on value. Look for old
(antique and modern) picture frames at boot and garage sales,
flea markets and collectors' fairs, and make a point of
visiting auctions where boxes of frames can be bought at
a pittance.

* Have black and white prints and engravings hand colored and
mounted or framed to increase the value of even the most
common and cheapest print.

* Give a Certificate of Authenticity. This is simply a sheet
of paper, with or without decorative border, which testifies
that the print is original and taken from a specific source
published on a particular date. The certificate is always
taped lightly to the back of the print in the mount so that
it cannot be removed and added to another print obtained
elsewhere.

* Make your listing for the print descriptive and include
details that are likely to attract bidders and be sure to
include words they might use to find products like yours.

* Make sure your listings include age, theme, date and source
of your prints.

* If your original book is special, say a first edition, or a
limited edition, say so in your listing. To people viewing
your listings it might make the difference between a sale
and giving your product the miss.

* Take great care removing prints from publications. We tend
to open the book midway and fold it back on itself, making
it very easy to break or weaken the spine and therefore
loosen the pages.

* A great place to get quality mounts very inexpensively is
on eBay itself. Go to the search facility, request a search
for items locally (so many available it isn't worth looking
long distance), and use keywords like: "mounts", "photo
mounts", and wait for a nice selection of suppliers to
appear, some selling items by auction, others offering
"Buy It Now".

* When you find a good supplier stick to that person and even
buy their items outside of eBay without breaking eBay's
rules of course.

There's more to it than just prints, you have the pick of dozens
of different products to sell, all from old books and magazines,
and just a few minutes easy work. Did I say "work", this isn't
work, this is exciting stuff!


Avril Harper is the author of Make Money Tearing Up Old Books
and Magazines and Selling Them on eBay http://www.benbeau.com