Maybe you're retiring and won't have space in your new, downsized home for his roomful of autographed baseballs, bats, and trading cards or her legion of Hummel figurines. Perhaps your Uncle Max bequeathed you his 10-album collection of 19th-century stamps. Or maybe public television's "Antiques Roadshow" program has you thinking about Great Grandma's set of Staffordshire china stowed in your cellar.

Collecting has its nonmonetary rewards, of course. Stamp and coin collectors talk about owning tiny pieces of history, while baseball cards can transport collectors right back to their wide-eyed days of youth, when they held a Jackie Robinson in their own hands. But however you acquired the collection and whatever its value to you, now you want to liquidate. What's the smartest way to sell without getting beat by the buyers?


Appraise your prizes

The most important part of selling a collection is understanding what it's worth. If you're still an avid collector, you already have a good sense of that. But if you've been pursuing your hobby more for pleasure than as an investment, stopped paying attention to your collection years ago, or inherited it from someone else, you may not realize the value in what you have.

"Most people who have the task of selling a collection are not the collectors themselves, but heirs," says Fred Baumann, a spokesman for the American Philatelic Association. "Very few collectors part with their collections when they're alive."

People who have inherited a collection are at the biggest disadvantage because they may have little or no appreciation for the hobby itself. That could lead them to underrate the potential value of those tinny American Flyer trains from 1907 or the boxfuls of garish Halloween decorations from the 1920s--which could be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Your first clues come from knowing if your benefactor, say, kindly Great Aunt Harriet, collected as a savvy investor and had the means to buy quality, or simply bought what she liked without regard for value. Sheryn Minton, an appraiser in Orlando, Fla., who specializes in dolls, recalls an elderly acquaintance who had a doll collection made up almost entirely of new beauties bought via TV shopping channels. But she also had a Bru, a rare porcelain-head doll made in Paris in the late 1800s that is prized by collectors.

"The shopping-channel dolls were worth maybe $2 apiece to a collector," Minton says. "The Bru was worth probably $20,000." Unfortunately, a visitor prowled over the collection one day and bought the Bru for just $50. "The buyer knew exactly what the old woman had," she says.


Tap expert wisdom

If your collection is portable, an easy and free way to get an idea of its value is to take it to a dealer. If it's large enough, some dealers will come to you. You can find dealers in the phone book, on the Web, and at collectors' shows, which take place regularly in metropolitan areas.

Don't even think of selling at this point, because a shifty dealer could lowball you to score a bargain. Get estimates from several. Try to read the dealer's body language for signs of special scrutiny and interest. A reputable one will tell you if the collection is important and whether it has any items warranting closer examination.

If a couple of dealers see some worth in the collection, you'll want to start toting up prices item by item. You can do this yourself, because the value of most things that people collect are tracked by price guides. For baseball cards, "The Standard Catalog" and "Beckett's Almanac" are two leading sources that list the prices of more than 500,000 cards. For coins, "A Guide Book of United States Coins"--collectors call it the Red Book--is a good source.

Key factors in determining value are rarity, age, scarcity, and demand. Items that were rare or expensive in their day start off with a value advantage because so few were produced. Age figures in because the more years that go by, the more likely that people will have discarded the item, making for scarcity today. So stamps issued after World War II are fairly common and generally don't have much value, whereas a rare $1 Trans Mississippi Exposition stamp from 1898 titled "Western Cattle in a Storm" can go for $1,250.

Condition also influences value. That 1959 Topps Mickey Mantle card will be worth a lot more if you kept it in near-mint condition when you were a kid instead of pinning it to your bicycle spokes to make your Schwinn sound like a Harley. For some types of items, such as coins and trading cards, you can have professionals officially grade the condition and seal the item in plastic. This can make selling easier, but reserve it only for items worth $20 or more because the certification service can cost $10.

Price guides won't tell you the ultimate sales price because demand by individual dealers and collectors will vary, and your opinion of grade or condition may be overoptimistic. Don't expect to get the top dollar shown. Guides typically list the retail prices that a collector can expect to pay. But a dealer will usually pay only a wholesale price, 20 to 50 percent below retail, because he or she has to cover overhead and selling risk, plus earn a profit.

"If it's a mint set, I pay 100 percent of the first column price in 'The Standard Catalog,'" says Alan Rosen, a well-known dealer of baseball cards and sports memorabilia in Montvale, N.J. "If the card is in excellent condition, I pay 60 percent of the excellent column price. If it's very good, I pay 30 percent of the very good column."

If your tally turns up big value, you may want to spring for an appraisal. That will cost a couple of dollars to several hundred, depending on the size and value of the collection and the region of the country. Look for an appraiser who specializes in the items in your collection--antique toys, stamps, coins, Depression glass, or whatever--and stick with one who's a member of one of the leading professional associations, the American Society of Appraisers and the Appraisers Association of America. Pay an hourly or flat rate, and never a fee based on a percentage of the assessed value. The latter could encourage an unscrupulous appraiser to artificially inflate the value beyond what you will actually sell it for.


Pick the best sales outlet

With a realistic price in mind for your collection, you're ready to go to market. You have three choices.

Sell to a dealer. This is the quickest and most convenient method. A dealer usually has the resources to buy the whole collection; he or she will pay with cash or a business check, and cart it away. The trade-off for this convenience is that you'll get the wholesale price, not retail.

Dealers are as close as your local hobby shop or collectors' show. You should consider a dealer especially if you have a small collection to sell.

Sell at auction. Here, you turn your collection over to an auction house on consignment. This can be a good choice if you have a large collection with at least some higher-value or specialty items in it. Auctioneers have a bloodhound's sense of the market and will break the collection into lots designed to squeeze out maximum prices. They're also hooked into a network of frequent buyers of your type of merchandise. If two bidders want what you've got, you may get a better price than if you deal with only one buyer.

But there is a risk that bidders will be focused on more rare and valuable lots, and you'll wind up with only a wholesale price, which is what's left after the 10 to 15 percent auctioneer's commission, says Jeffrey Daniher, a certified financial planner at Ritter Daniher Financial Advisory in Cincinnati. That's what happened when he sold a 1795 U.S. silver dollar with a book value of $5,500 at a Long Beach, Calif., auction. He netted $4,500, about what a dealer would have paid.

Beware of the promises an auctioneer might make to get your business. Rosen tells of one who told a seller that he could fetch $15,000 for a 1933 baseball that was autographed by Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. "That ball's only worth about $8,200," says Rosen. "The Yankees didn't win the championship in '33, and the ball had a little shellac on it, some nicks. I offered $6,000, and he went back to the auctioneer and asked what price he would guarantee. He said $5,000." The man ended up selling the ball to Rosen.

Dolls face their own perils. Experts warn that an auctioneer might strip your doll's valuable vintage dress and put it on someone else's doll to sell the other doll for a higher price. But you don't get a piece of that action, and the bids on your item may suffer from a poorer showing.

Sell it yourself. This requires the most time and effort. You'll need to place ads in magazines or newspapers. If you use eBay, you'll need to photograph, price, and describe each item, and you take on the chore of shipping and handling as well as the risk of bounced checks or returns. But the hope is that you'll find a collector willing to pay retail. The downside is that you'll have overhead costs to subtract from your price.

eBay is a wonderful sales tool for collectors because it has hugely increased the number of potential buyers, who have an easy way to search for specific items. That broader reach, however, has made for a more competitive marketplace, which tends to push prices down. "eBay often gets you only a wholesale price because it's such a pure market," says T.S. O'Connell, editor of Sports Collectors Digest in Iola, Wis., which covers cards and other memorabilia.

Whatever amount you finally get for your collection, make sure you temper any price disappointment by factoring in the years of enjoyment you or your relative may have gained by collecting. Unless you're in it purely for the money, that may provide your biggest payback.