Find a Book, Tear It Up, and Sell the Pages on eBay

I’m forever writing about ways to turn old newspapers, books and  magazines into saleable products on eBay and I’m also a dab hand at making money that way myself.

It all started in 2003 when I first considered eBay as a viable business and I was gobsmacked to discover old pages from vintage and sometimes modern magazines fetching double and triple figure sums on eBay. 

I’ve collected ephemera (paper collectibles) all my adult life, I already knew how valuable these things can be, but I was totally unprepared for the kind of money being paid for odd pages or even tiny part page cuttings from publications that can easily be picked up for pennies, at most a few pounds apiece at boot sales and flea markets, also auction salerooms.

My biggest shock was someone selling a single page from a well known dog book and getting $160 for it, literally one solitary page from a book I already had which contained thousands of similar prints of different dog breeds.  That one page was a picture of a Pug and the seller boasted double figure sums for over 100 pages from the same book – ‘Hutchinson’s Dog Encyclopaedia’ – published as a three-volume set in the 1930s.  I had that set myself, it cost me about $20 many years before, you can buy it today for about $400 in good condition and much less in damaged, often called ‘breaker’, condition.

‘Breakers’ are books that no serious collector wants, they’re usually dirty on the outside and sometimes the cover is missing or torn.  But inside those books can be in perfect condition and just perfect for  tearing apart and selling as individual pages or chapters on eBay. 

This has been such a profitable venture for me and I don’t mind sharing my secrets with you, purely because few others are following this simple strategy on eBay and also because, with so many subjects lending themselves to this easy business, I’m unlikely ever to face competition.

So I sell doggy stuff from original vintage publications which are now in the public domain, I never sell from modern publications because there are trademark and copyright issues to contend with. I haven’t even touched thousands of subjects for which an easy market exists on eBay.  Subjects like: cats, travel, exploration, plants, birds, ships, trains, and many more, all just waiting for someone to buy and dismantle old publications and find customers aplenty on eBay.

In my first three months on eBay I dismantled my own ‘Hutchinson’s Dog Encyclopaedia’ and sold hundreds of prints, all $20 starting price which is what most actually fetched, with about five in ten fetching $20 plus and around ten per cent reaching the $50 plus mark It’s so easy and I recommend you also give it a go, starting with books containing pictures, preferably photographs, of subjects many people enthuse about, in my case dogs, but also including trains, buses, cats, town views, suffragettes, and much more besides.

Avril Harper is the author of ‘Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them on eBay’