A Search for a Book on Collectible Banks

Sunday, November 3, 2013
       Daylight Savings Time Begins

A Search for a Book on

Collectible Banks

   I woke up early today after having eaten too much last night. That usually happens to me! My clock told me that it was 5:56 A.M., but when I went to the computer the time was 4:56 A.M.  I forgot about daylight savings time here in North America. That's where clocks are turned back 1 hour so children can have daylight as the go to school. In spring, the clocks are moved forward by 1 hour, so everyone can have an extra hour of daylight.

  Returning to the subject (sort of) of toys, a small car bank circa 1950's caught my eye.The manufacturer was Banthrico ,and the car was a bright pink coloured 1950's model - just on the "cusp" (almost) of my blog timeline. It's not a toy,but a bank,but I could easily add a post on the Banthrico company and their banks. It turns out that the company made all kinds of small banks for children and adults,to of course save money. As well, you could find these banks in banks! When I did an ebay search one of the items that came up from the search was a book titled "Coin Banks by Banthrico", by Mr. James (Jim) Redwine, and published by Shiffer Publishing. On most of their books they write "A Schiffer Book for Collectors", as they publish many books about all kinds of collectibles. 

   What caught my attention, and thus resulted in today's post is the fact that the prices of any used or new book will vary by large amounts. I'll try and present the facts and let you come up with your own conclusions. 

   First and foremost is the search,search engine, and the clients of the search engine.  For those who don't know, companies can pay search engines to assign them higher positions on the search engine results. So if you do a search through Google or Bing for a book, ebay will come up right away. So as it happens so far, ebay has paid Google or Bing fees to have a search result be prioritized at the top of any search. Both companies have been hugely successful with this relationship, as have many other companies. Also,every search engine is no different.However when you're # 1 you have to stay ahead and keep that position.  Yahoo, which as recently as 6 months ago, was independent,but was recently purchased by Google.

As you can see, I misspelled the name of the bank company. I typed in the letter "f", where there shouldn't have been any. Nevertheless, I got 22 results.  My search also has too many words.Google will decide to reduce this number later on as we shall see.The fewer words, the faster the search,and the better the results.

Once again, there are too many words. Also, I don't have the correct title of the book. The title is "Coin Banks by Banthrico".  However, I now have 743 results.

I used fewer words, and took out the name of the author, and received 184,000 results. I'd be surprised if the publisher even printed that many books!

Here's a screen capture of a Google result with more details. 

Notice how ebay and  Amazon come up as "hits". 

This is Microsoft's Bing's search engine results with 23,700 "hits".  It's amazing how everyone  never realized how successful Google would become.even Microsoft was caught watching instead of looking to see what was happening. Today, they are trying to catch up with advertisements. The same can also be said for "social networks" that both Google and Microsoft  are now carefully watching. There's not a day that doesn't go by, when both my Hotmail account and my Google accounts are bombarded with ads to join up to their social networks!

Bing's top results by ranking spread out the results so there are less of 1 principal result - ebay.

Here is the page result from another search engine called Webcrawler. E-bay takes up a lot of the page, but it's not # 1 on the list. However, we see that Sears is at the top,followed by another company. I'm sure right now, there are hundreds of writers writing about Google  and other search engines trying to catch up to Google.

Here are the results form another search engine called Lycos.

  ebay and Amazon are still at the top of the search results.

Lycos is questioning my spelling.It doesn't know that Mr. Jim Redwine is a person.

Here are the results from AbeBooks.

 It is a large company that partners with smaller book sellers to sell books.

Notice that there is a spread of prices for the books. Each dealer sets the price, and also pays Abebooks a commission or percentage of the sale. So the final price naturally  incorporates the cost of doing business.

Here's Amazon's least-expensive listing for this book

Here are Amazon's other listings with their prices. There are also shipping costs involved, and if you live in canada, our Canadian government may try and collect taxes as well!

Here are ebay's results.

You will get different results Depending on what words you enter into an ebay search.  

Here's another company buy the name of Powell's Books.

 A good idea is to get as much information as possible about the book.

Another good idea is to get as many different reviews from different sources as possible.

Also, try and find a website that has 

photos of the inside page and very good written descriptions 

of the book. 

As it turned out, I revised this post and added the part about photos.

It turned out that Collector Bookstore has some sample pages in their description, as well as a very good price for the book.

And the best idea of all is to go to the original publisher website. 

In this case its' Schiffer Publishing, and they still have inventory of new books at a reasonable price. 

Who would have known?

You can also try local bookstores and used book stores.However, the Net has certainly changed the playing field, and many used book stores are having to adapt to the Internet.  A few used book stores in Montreal have closed down, as have new bookstores.  That's what progress does,for good or for bad, depending on your point-of-view. As for antique toys,  that marketplace certainly has changed! That's a post to be written in the future!

Thanks for dropping by,

and have a great part of the day,

wherever you may be.

Stacey

write to me anytime at:

toysearcher@gmail.com,