The art of the sale

Something is only worth what somebody will pay for it, and this is usually a lot less than you hoped it would be worth, especially if you’ve been carefully keeping the thing in question in a cupboard for decades, waiting for it to accrue value.

My mother is slowly whittling down her mountain of crap she brought with her on the move by handing it to me and saying ‘put this on eBay and we’ll split the profit’.

In this case it’s a Conway ‘popular model’ camera. It’s actually something of a thing of beauty, a metal and bakelite box with two viewfinders, one for portrait and the other for landscape – you turn the camera on its side! Genius! Take that photoshop.

It is, of course, worth little in terms of money. A little research showed that the camera was mass-produced in Birmingham for the ‘budget’ end of the market, a little time on eBay shows them on sale for a couple of quid. So, it sits on my desk.

The way to sell it is to sell the idea rather than the actuality. Put a dent in the side and it becomes the camera that stopped a bullet for Laurie Lee in the Spanish civil war. Put a scratch down the side and it was the camera that Hemmingway had with him on safari. This camera could have been used by gangsters, bootleggers, lords, ladies, it could have been used to manufacture scandal, it could have been the camera that took photographs of a ghost, of a miracle.


It could even be cursed – because, you see, this camera belonged to Roderick Fanshaw, quite famous in the 1960s as a ghost-hunter and debunker (note to self- set up fake Wikipedia page) who’s last case was investigating a crypt in a church where, local legend had it, something, maybe even the devil himself, was said to appear at certain times. Certainly Fanshaw had been called in by a concerned former school chum, now a doctor in the area that had treated a young girl for shock after she said she saw something. Tosh, of course, but if Fanshaw could prove it was tosh, then it would be good for the village and for the girl. Fanshaw descended to the crypt for the night with some blankets, a lantern, a thermos of tea and his Conway.

When they found him the next morning he was sitting on the floor of the crypt, his back to the wall, a look of utter terror on his face. Stone dead, with the Conway camera gripped tightly in his cold, stiff hands.

There had been one exposure taken. After much discussion it was decided to develop the film, possibly revealing who, or what had literally scared Fanshaw to death.

Option A: a copy of the photograph, the original of which is now in a private collection, is being sold with the camera. Opening bid: £25. (Photograph is actually of Fanshaw in the crypt, already dead but the crypt sealed – whoever or whatever killed him took the photograph – spooooooooooky!)

Option B: When they opened the camera, the film had burned to ash inside the camera, but there was no damage to the camera itself. Did Fanshaw really photograph the Devil himself? Ash included in purchase, opening bid: £25.

The stuff we buy today will not be on eBay decades hence, most likely it’ll be propping up some landfill somewhere. Things that we like to spend money on, like tellys and games consoles and computers have a new problem – obsolescence, they simply fail to work. A few months ago the very last poleroid film made passed its ‘use by’ date. No more poleroids. These days you’ve barely got your computer unpacked before you find it can’t run some application.