Over the years many people have asked me how easy (or difficult!) it would be today to put together a collection of vintage pre-1979 Batman items of this magnitude.

 

I would honestly have to say that it would be practically impossible!

 

I will tell you why.

 

If someone as wealthy as, say, Bruce Wayne, with unlimited funds, threw enough money at it I am certain they could build a collection of perhaps 60% or even 70% of what the very largest collections have in the space of just a few short years. While not exactly readily available the bulk of items can, with effort and determination, be hunted down through dealers, auction houses and collectors who might be persuaded to part with them for the right price. Money, as they say, talks! However, the rarest stuff, the heart and soul of the very best collections, is just not available and practically never comes up for sale. This element would always be missing.

 

Those fortunate few of us that came into the hobby right at the start searched out and picked up, what in many cases turned out to be, the last known remaining examples of many items. You’d be amazed at how many items I found gathering dust in store stockrooms in the 1970s and 1980s that turned out to be amongst the last in existence. But as rare as some of those may be I am certain that there will equally be many items of which no remaining examples now exist and which are completely lost to the ravages of time . On only the rarest of occasions (and those occasions are getting even rarer with time) does something wonderfully ‘new’ get re-discovered.