An Interview with Harry Rinker

Mark: As you know, the 1980¹s was really a time of growth and discovery in the collectibles field. Could you comment on that decade of activity?
Harry: There¹s no question about that and I¹d like to say that I take a certain amount of egotistical credit for that... Now I don¹t think that I¹m responsible for the collectibles market, I don¹t want to for one moment suggest that, but back in 1981 when I took over Warman¹s and we looked at what was happening in the market, I saw that there were really two distinct markets out there - one for antiques and one for collectibles - and you have to remember that part of my background is‹ I was in York in 1972-1976 as the director of the Historical Society of York County Pennsylvania, but also in York at that time was Ted Hake, myself, Ron Leverman, who is one of the big antiquarian book dealers of today and George Philophilus [sp?], the miscellaneous man, the big poster guy and also there was a guy named Jim Stambaugh. Well, Jim went on to a museum career, he was with the Billy Graham Museum, but he was a big in photography, whatever, and all the rest of us went on to big careers in the trade, but largely through Ted¹s influence we began to recognize the tremendous impact of collectibles and so when I became editor of Warman¹s and was looking for a way to make my mark in the trade, you know my choice was either to take the Kovels on in the antique sector, do what they do, only do it better‹which I think I could have done had I chosen that route‹ or look at a new marketplace and define it. Well, I looked at the collectibles marketplace at the time and I said to myself ³there is nobody out there trying to pull all of these diverse categories together², so I thought, well, maybe we should try doing a price guide; well, you know you can¹t do a price guide on the collectibles market without getting involved with a lot of thinking what belongs in the price guide, how you define what a collectible is and so forth and so from that, Warman¹s Americana and Collectibles was born at the same time. I also decided that it was time for me to launch a column in the trade. Since I was concerned about the collectibles side of the fence, I launched a column that would essentially support the Americana and Collectibles. So I started right here on collectibles and when it got started the criteria was that I would not write about anything made before 1900; now, today of course, you think of 1900 more on the antique category than you do in terms of the collectibles category. Back in 1984, when I launched Americana and Collectibles, 1900 was still considered very much a part of the collectible realm, not part of the antique sector. Now, a lot has happened since then; numerous categories have come along, there have been tremendous changes in the trade and it¹s all been wonderful, but I¹ll give you a piece of information that not too many people in the trade know yet, but they will very shortly: I¹m leaving Warman¹s. The 7th Americana, the 7th Warman¹s Americana and Collectibles will be my last. The mistake I made when I launched that book was I let the publisher own the copyright. The gal that was my #1 assistant, Ellen Troy, she is going to take over and edit it, but I¹m going to launch Rinker¹s Collectibles in 1997, with a brand new book on collectibles, where I¹m going to attempt, yet again, to redefine what is a collectible and bring the collectible world to the Post W.W.II time era.
Mark:So, we hope there will be a big glass section in there too, right?
Harry: Well, there¹s gonna be a lot of stuff in that book; one of the things I never liked about Americana and Collectibles is we didn¹t put furniture and a lot of the lifestyle stuff in there. I didn¹t like the fact that we had a lot of Pre-W.W.II stuff in Americana and Collectibles, but because of the way we defined it historically, it belonged in there. I¹m anxious to launch a major new price guide that¹s strongly post- Œ45 and is much broader in scope in terms of its coverage, and actually I think today and I this is what¹s gonna happen is Rinker¹s Antiques is going to come out every other year and I think that is the way the market shifted.
Mark: Okay.
Harry: Anyway, I¹m sorry; will there be a lot of glass? Sure there¹ll be a lot of glass.
Mark: Well, good. Good.
Harry: There¹ll be a lot of great stuff in there. It¹s gonna be a lot of, you know, there¹s a lot of new collection categories out there, a lot of new crossover categories. Out there you¹re seeing a bit of that in collectibles classified sets too.
Mark:Sure. Now, now getting back, back to my first question‹the second part‹tell me about the 1990¹s. I see the current era as a period of stabilization ...
Harry: I, no, no, well what happened was the boom times actually were between 1982 and 1988.
Mark: Right.
Harry:...and what happened was, that was a time when nobody could lose. You could buy something, put more money on it and somebody else bought it. Well in a way, there were guys like myself who thought the recession couldn¹t come soon enough, to be perfectly honest with you, because quite honestly there were no technical questions in pricing in that six year period between 1982 and 1988 and then when the recession hit, the recession showed that there were a lot of interesting things besides this trade. Probably one of the most important things the recession showed was that there was a price at which something would not sell. An object could reach a point where it simply would not sell, nobody would buy it, and that was a lesson we needed to learn in the antique and collectible business really badly and so what happened was of course, all the winners were the people that sold all the stuff and had the cash and all the losers were people with boatloads of stuff they couldn¹t sell. The recession also taught us that while speculation is nice, it¹s also terribly risky. That a stronger market is one with much more gradual growth. Now I think we saw some heavy duty price declines in the late 80¹s and early 90¹s, but I do think in the mid-1990¹s, things have stabilized. What I think, where I think we are with the market at the moment is this, I think everyone wants the market to take off. I think the market has a lot of strength in it. I think the price decline has ended, it is not gonna go any further, but I don¹t see the people taking the risk to push the market up the same way as it did before; now, that may be one of the effects of the recession. So those of us who were dealers‹not me because I don¹t deal‹but for those dealers, for the period before the recession and into the 90¹s, it takes a couple decades to forget that. No, it takes a couple decades for new collectors who didn¹t live through the recession. I mean what lessons did every dealer who went through the recession learn? Well, they learned, as I said, that there is a price at which objects will not sell. They learned that the traditional buying sources, dealer, dealer sales, and auctions are not, are sometimes a viable way to buy for collectors, but they¹re not great ways to buy as dealers. You can¹t buy the stuff with enough margin left to make a living. They also learned they had to go back to traditional sources; they learned not to carry heavy inventory loads. Today¹s dealer probably has one half to two-thirds of inventory levels he ran earlier because they just don¹t stock up anymore. They work on much shorter inventory, and they don¹t pre-buy anywhere near like they used to. I mean Atlantic City was a great show, but it wasn¹t a great show in the pre-selling. Most dealers down there had very poor pre-show sales. They did great during the show, and then the dealers, once they had their money in their hands, did some buying at the end, but I think that is one of the consequences of the recession and if that¹s the lesson we learned from the recession, then in my point of view it¹s a good lesson to have learned. Don¹t spend your money before you have it. Mark: Right. Tell me, what collectible fields do you see now that you think are going to pass as fads? Harry: Ahhh that¹s, well I guess my first comment to you would be that I think every field, every new collecting field comes into the business in a very exciting inflationary way right away, and that happened with collecting drinking glasses. C¹mon you guys, you know they went from nickels to dimes to quarters at garage sales to one buck, two bucks, four bucks, ten bucks...
Mark: Right.
Harry: ...and then they, then they fell back.
Mark: Right.
Harry:The market got flooded, people got tired of it.
Mark: They found out they couldn¹t get $10 for all their Camp Snoopy Glasses.
Harry: That¹s exactly right and so prices fell back and stabilized.
Mark: Right.
Harry: Now what you¹re seeing is instead of the entire market taking off, you are seeing segments of the market get hot, cool off, and so forth. All right?
Mark: All right.
Harry: So, when something comes into the trade, you go through this introductory speculation. It¹s like you also had a lot of speculators in drinking glasses early in the game. I think you don¹t have so many in there now, but I mean you had them. So you know, in terms of a category that is going to fade away, categories don¹t fade away; rather what they do is they stabilize out in price, and you don¹t see much price dropping around for years.
Mark: All right.
Harry: Okay. Now to me there is no question in my mind that Pez has had its day.
Mark: Oh, is that right? Okay
Harry: Oh, I¹m a great believer that the Pez run is over. Now you won¹t find a Pez collector that agrees with me. No, no but, but you see these guys are all short term. They¹re all looking at the short term. It¹s guys like me with our big analytical databases that say that¹s fine.
Mark: Well, I guess the one I was thinking about was Pogs. They seem to come on hot and now...
Harry: Oh you know I think that they will come and go, and Pogs will never enter my price guide.
Mark: Oh is that right? Okay.
Harry: ...and I¹ll tell you why. Because the manufacturer of Pogs made a serious error; they threw too many out there too fast and there¹s no way to classify them or categorize them. I think telephone calling cards are another example of a category that got very manipulated by the manufacturer, by the high-end dealers to the point where you just have to say to yourself, wait a minute here, okay, there is nothing to be gained by dealing with this category. Okay?
Mark: Okay.
Harry: Now, now let¹s deal with categories, I mean we already know baseball cards are in a terrible mess.
Mark: Right.
Harry: I think contemporary Barbies, all these Holiday Barbies and all the rest of this Teacher Barbie and all the other modern speculative Barbies, that market is slated for a major collapse in the years ahead I think. I am not so sure we are not going to see some collapse in the action figure market; not a lot, but I keep wondering how many more action figures can we absorb in the market before the markets sweat it out and go flat and I think you are already seeing a certain amount of that type of stuff right now. Ummm, I think you can say on the whole, the 50¹s market¹s going flat at the moment as a new generation of collectors is coming along who¹s far more interested in the 60¹s and the 70¹s. You have to see this to some degree reflected in your glasses, I would think.
Mark: Oh, we do. You know, Davy Crocket glasses in particular, they¹re, they¹re tough to find, but nobody wants them.
Harry: Right. I would say there¹s even some truth to the Welch¹s at this point at least.
Mark: Yes. They are down from what they probably bought five of ten years ago.
Harry: Yeah and I think this is the phenomenon. You know, one of the major phenomena that is happening in collectibles collecting in that last decade, it started in the 80¹s and it¹s clearly in place now is what we call one generation collectibles. The idea that the collectible is valid only from the time the kids play with it until that generation that played with it died.
Mark: Right.
Harry:...and the next generation has no interest whatsoever in the subject.
Mark: What about some of the current ones; I think about the Flintstones coming out in the 60¹s and how they¹re pretty hot right now.
Harry: Oh, listen. From my point of view if you want,‹ again, since you actually want my predictions and may get me in all kinds of trouble out there with the collector, the name of the game is as follows: my guess is that by 2001 Hanna Barbara Collectibles will replace Disney Collectibles as king of the hill.
Mark: Is that right? Because they¹re still being expanded into the 80¹s and 90¹s?
Harry: Everything has to do with Saturday morning television cartoons. I mean I understand about the Flintstones and the Jetsons on prime time and all the rest of this. Its not about prime time‹it¹s about Saturday mornings.
Mark: Well, there aren¹t cartoons where I live on Saturday mornings anymore.
Harry: That¹s right, but that¹s what Hanna Barbara did to cartoons.
Mark: Look, tell me what kind of glasses do you have in your collection?
Harry: What do I have?
Mark: You have a room dedicated to glasses there at the institute, right?
Harry: Nice guy! I have‹I have a few. I have‹what do I have? I have some Dudley Do-Right stuff from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. I have some Welch¹s Grape Juice stuff because of the fact that that¹s what I ate as a kid to get em¹. Although I don¹t have a lot of them, I¹d like to buy more back, but I you know, I¹m the kind of guy that thinks that if God wants me to own them I¹ll find them in mint condition at a garage sale for a buck apiece. I have a very nice set of early Cinderella stuff. I have some regional sports stuff only because I think I ought to have that. Ahhh, so I have some regional sports stuff. I got some fast food stuff, ahhh, largely McDonald¹s. I think if I went down and looked real carefully, I mean I don¹t have that many glasses, but I know I had, it sounds like I do though, probably more that I realize I do if I¹d ever check. Ummm, but I have some fast food stuff that I¹ve collected over the years. You know I just bought, as you know from my, our phone interview, I just stopped at Burger King and grabbed a couple of Pocahontas glasses, not because I¹m big on Pocahontas, but I like the boxes they were in and they were selling them off cheap at the one Burger Kings I was at. Ummm, actually, the glass that I¹m most interested in and I don¹t have very many of these, I like glasses that advertise newspapers and radios. Ahhh now they¹re not the kind of things you guys deal with that much, but like the Allentown Morning Call did a series of drinking glasses that had historic issues of their paper on them.
Mark: Right.
Harry: I have a set of those, and I have some others. Every once in awhile, I always love to pick up radio related premiums just because they¹re neat and also always inexpensive. But I will tell you whatever. You guys beat me to the punch, I¹ve been saving away plastic drinking glasses. Well I have to tell you in all fairness I think they¹re gonna make a better display over time than the glasses, because their more colorful, they¹re larger, they¹re more, they got, they have a lot of great designs, not that some drinking glasses didn¹t have great designs, but my god some of those, a lot of cups coming out of the fast food premiums are top of the line.
Mark:...and they¹re harder to find in mint condition, too.
Harry: Yes they are. Absolutely they are.
Mike: ...and another thing, the best thing of all is that they are not very breakable.
Harry: ...but, I will tell you, you flip them inside of each other and they¹re very scratchable right now. I mean, you gotta be very careful how you handle them.
Mike: I thought for a long time that plastic glasses would have their day and I, I¹m not even really sure why I thought that, but I really believe they will. There have to be fewer of them in good shape than there are glass glasses.
Harry: I think I would be inclined to agree with you. I don¹t think people see in them the collectability level they see in the glass glasses, the glass made out of glass.
Mike: Yes. One thing I was wondering about, once a collectable field collapses, so to speak, can you think of any examples of how it recovers, I mean can they ever recover?
Harry: Oh well, sure. Well, first of all, I believe all movements are price movements in the antiques and collectibles field. That curve is catastrophic‹ by that I mean that an object may sell at the same price level plus or minus 5% for a period of time for five to twenty years, and then all of a sudden something happens that sends the market off in a flurry. Okay? I call those things that cause that‹ ³market triggers,² and there are a lot of things that can trigger a market. A number of articles on the front pages of trade papers can trigger a market; a new book with new prices and a lot of new information can trigger a market. You know, a television show centering around a specific era can trigger a market. There are a lot of market triggers‹that¹s one of the things we watch out for. We track antiques and collectibles here obviously because of my database, and you know we are constantly looking for potential triggers in the marketplace coming on down the line that we think could send the market up and running. You know the 25th anniversary of something, the 50th anniversary of something, that could trigger a market. The death of a generation could end a market.
Mike: To what extent is any of this predictable because as you know‹with the stock market for example‹nobody rings a bell to warn you about big shifts.
Harry: Yeah. It¹s extremely predictable.
Mike: Is it?
Harry: Yes, absolutely. Now, we do tremendous amounts of predicting here, and we¹ve got our accuracy rate up to about 75-80% now. Now, it¹s based on the fact that I have a lot of privileges to information about what¹s coming up down the pike six and nine months, ten months and even as far as two and three years out in terms of books, new books, articles. The ability to talk to a trade magazine and ³bump² get certain articles planted where they need to be planted. Or to find out what articles they have on the fireplace so that, you know, I know where they¹re going. So it¹s very predictable. I will not tell you what we¹re predicting next because I don¹t think it¹s my responsibility to the trade as a reporter‹I¹m not a market predictor. Now, I am also aware of the fact that the people like Kovels or myself or others, if we say it¹s gonna happen, can often make it happen and therefore, I don¹t want to be responsible for the success of a category, and I don¹t want to be responsible for the death of one. [but] I think I¹ve been responsible for hurrying the death of a few in my time.
Mike: Could you comment in general on the respectability of collecting glasses, cartoon character glasses?
Harry: I think one of the great things that happened in the 80¹s and I think it¹s very much in play today is, nobody gives a damn what you collect anymore. Oh, that is not totally true, there are what I call, in the trade, snots; the high-end antique people who look down their noses...
Mike: Yes, that¹s what I was thinking of.
Harry: ...at collectors and so forth, but I think that number is lessening. I think what the modern young collectors today, the 20 something and 30 something collectors, the, the tail- end baby boomer collectors, the dink and the yuppie collector, the X generation and the Me generation collector, what they discovered is that it¹s the joy that¹s in the collecting and that while it¹s all right to collect for social prestige, which is what a lot of people collected antiques for in the old days; they didn¹t know, they didn¹t know anything about them‹ they just collected them for the prestige of owning them. They were in their corporate offices and they were in their homes and as long as they decide their friends from the Country Club set, but when you, if you went in the homes of the collectors, some of them paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you say tell me about that piece and they get a dumb look on their face or they go and get the sales receipt out, that the dealer wrote for them and read it to you. You know I think today it¹s fun to collect everything. I think you¹re going to see Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes and collector glasses in the board room and offices of some of the big people in the country. People have learned to collect what they like. In fact, they, they, they wind up collecting their childhood. In fact, they don¹t collect their childhood‹because in a way you two guys are a perfect example, that if you collected your childhood, you¹d own ten drinking glasses. What you do is collect the childhood you wish you would have had, if you¹d spent your money wisely or you had good parents or both.
Mike: Yes. That seems to be the case.
Harry: You know, I always tell people, that people are buying back their childhood. That¹s the drive of today¹s modern collector. Now for everyone, but for most of them; the majority of collectors today don¹t look very far past their own childhood of the ages of about seven to fourteen. Only they don¹t buy back the childhood they had, they don¹t, oh sure they go out and buy their favorite toy, but then when, once they get that back, they literally go out and buy, they literally go out and buy, ummm, everything they wish they would have had given to them had their parents had unlimited bank accounts.
Mark: Do you have a home page up yet?
Harry: Not yet. [Note: He does have a home page now http://www.harryrinker.com]
Mark: No, you¹re probably working on that?
Harry: Yes.
Mark: ... and what kind of effect do you think this market is gonna have or already has had in terms of the internet
Harry: Well, its been very interesting. I¹ve been hearing a lot of, hearing a lot of stuff from National Public Radio and the news about the consolidation and the overplay of the internet. I don¹t think we¹ve seen 5% of the potential of the internet for the collecting market yet.
Mark: I agree.
Harry: I think that where the internet is going to go and where it¹s gonna take collecting, it¹s gonna make collecting international to begin with. I think we are all waiting to see who is gonna be the winner, where is everybody gonna go. As an independent, I don¹t want to be linked in with any one site. I¹m not up on the internet right now, at least not openly. I mean, I¹m up there, but not where people can, can find me openly and that is because I haven¹t figured out how to make money from the internet.
Mark: We¹ve had our home page up for about a month and, it¹s been interesting. We¹re finding a lot of new people, new niches ...
Harry: Oh, absolutely, and I have a commercial site reserved and, I¹m also being courted by many other commercial sites.
Mark: Right. Right. I think the beauty of it is the individual part of it and being able to go out and do it yourself.
Harry: The only problem I have with that is I am very disturbed about several things. One of them, one of the problems we have with the trade is what I call instant experts. Somebody who simply declares themselves an expert starts passing out information and I have surfed the web quite a lot and I will tell you there is a lot of bad data out. No, tremendous amounts of it.
Mark: Oh, sure.
Harry: There¹s no way to police it, and this is a grave concern to me. That¹s one of the reasons why I¹m leaning real heavily to doing my own site cause I don¹t want to be associated with a site where there¹s a lot of misinformation and there¹s a lot of misinformation in these chat rooms and everywhere else where everybody gives their opinion. I also think the internet is bad in another way in a sense that it leads to some of the most stupid debates in the trade I¹ve ever seen. There was a debate going on in one of the groups, and I don¹t remember which one it was, about McCoy pottery. Should or shouldn¹t you collect more McCoy pottery. Well, the truth of the matter is that the amount of hours spent debating it‹(a) McCoy is collected and (b) what a dumb question; you oughta collect everything. Well, I mean you know, but is there, is there a future in the internet? Absolutely, there¹s no doubt in my mind, I am absolutely, totally convinced that the internet is where the game is going to play. Now, and one of the things by the way for you guys is that¹s why I¹m looking at the internet is because my attitude is if I¹m going to serve today¹s collectors with my information database up here and if they¹re gonna be in to me, I need to be up on the internet. The other thing that I am looking at, even though there is a live discussion about this stuff too and that is CDRom technology. We just signed a contract with House of Collectibles and the Random House; the first to produce the first CDRom electronic price guides.
Mark: Good.
Harry: Yeah. You know it¹s gonna be like a book on CDRom.
Mark: Sure, and the disc would be able to search on different topics and get all the information.
Harry: No, their gonna come out with special topics. Initially, the first one is a baby boomer one called ³Toys I Played With as a Kid.²
Mark: Right, but I¹m saying if I¹d search on Flintstones, I could get all the items that you had in there concerning the Flintstones.
Harry: Yeah, that¹s right and they¹re interactive too, so when you go to Flintstone stuff within the toy disc...
Mark: Right, I might get something out of watches and, and...
Harry: ...and you¹ll get a listing of the Flintstones and who played the characters, plus a description of the object, plus a price, plus a whole bunch of other stuff.
Mark: Harry, thanks for taking the time to talk with us and sharing your thoughts with our readers.
Mike: Thanks, Harry.

By Collector Glass News - Mark Chase & Michael Kelly