Bodnar’s Auction Sales in Edison, N.J., has grown its speciality toy sales to the point they are starting to get calls from people in various parts of the U.S. looking to liquidate their collections. Owner Joseph Bodnar believes one key to holding successful toy sales is selling everything together as a single-owner grouping. “Keeping the collection together is crucial to get the buyers to come out.” Many people will either sell off the best part of their collection first, leaving the rest behind, or many auctioneers will only want to pick out your best items, leaving you to figure out what to do with the rest.” Over the years, Bodnar has earned a reputation of being very good at bringing a collection to market. His not-so-secret secret makes perfect sense. When you keep everything together, it will spark the interest of more buyers to come from far and wide to bid on the items. It will take extra work to sell low price point items, but it can work well in the end for consignor and seller.
A call came in from Minnesota, making Bodnar realize not only does his investing in marketing and advertising pay off, his reach was far outside his New Jersey location. The call was from a woman who had spent years collecting with her brother in the hopes of one day opening a store they could run together. Unfortunately, her brother had died, and due to the fact she was disabled, she needed a wise exit strategy from her massive collections.
It took two moving trucks, Bodnar’s entire staff, and over 1,000 miles of driving to get the boxed up material to Bodnar’s facility at the New Jersey Convention and Expo Center. There were over 300 long boxes of comics that needed to be looked through and photographed as well as over 600 boxes packed with various pop-culture figures and items. As the staff sorted, organized, and took photographs, they kept unveiling more and more treasures.
“Massive” was the one word Joseph Bodnar could describe what was in front of him. There were many 12-75 cent comics, including Fantastic Four, The Thing, Conan, Captain Marvel, The Amazing Spiderman, Tarzan, Machine Man, War of the Worlds, Batman, and Detective Comics, among others. There were full and partial runs of many popular but also obscure comics.
In the pop-culture action figure category, there were hundreds of “Star Wars” figures and many other movie and TV related items, such as a life-sized Homer Simpson, He-Man, Indiana Jones, The Smurfs, Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, many various Hanna Barbera figures, Transformers, DC, Marvel, GI Joe, XYBER 9, Monster High, X-Men, TMNT, various Disney movie figures, Duck Dodgers and Care Bears, as well as many obscure figures, wacky wobblers, and vintage and unique finds.
In addition to all the pop culture and comics is a large amount of autographed memorabilia and wrestling memorabilia. There is a WWE Championship belt, a signed and framed photo of TNA wrestlers, and many signed action figures still on the card just to name a few. There are also thousands of DVDs, including many full box sets of various TV shows.
It is almost impossible to list all the different categories of pop culture figures and comics that are in the collection.
The sale will take place on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the New Jersey Convention and Expo Center at 97 Sunfield Ave., Edison, N.J. The doors will open for preview at 9 a.m. on sale day, and the sale will begin at 11 a.m.
To get an early preview, visit www.bodnarsauction.com and see all the photos.
For further information, call 732-210-6388.