[Closed] The story of James Wieland, as promised.

The story of James Wieland, as promised.

A disclaimer- I never knew Mr. Wieland, but I heard corroborating stories about him and his collection; please correct me if I am wrong.

Firstly, James was a devoted collector and the owner of the Miniature Auto Sales store in Bethlehem, Connecticut. He also co-authored a "Detroit in Miniatures" book; his interests were quite wide, he collected models and toys from all over the world in most scales. The collection was in tens of thousands pieces...

He passed away a few years ago with no family members left. Apparently, there was no will- the entire collection and the store inventory went into the government-appointed estate administrator, who had the task of quickly disposing it all. Somehow, a portion of the collection ended up in the hands of Ontario's Attorney General office ( which handles cases like that; the rumour is James was a Canadian citizen) and went to the public auction. Items were brought in in clear plastic bags with total disregard to their content. The majority of cars were without boxes, although James would have always keep the box. It looked like someone just went over shelf by shelf with a hand and let the models drop freely into bags. The boxes were, probably, discarded as having no value, if they were kept separately. Many models were damaged. The auctioneers sold the bags; one had to guess to what's inside. Some people took the chances; two of them had not been collectors and the items were sold on Ebay. You may recall- about two years ago a lady from Ontario was listing batches of 30-40 rare models weekly with a $1 starting price; the other was also a lady and her starting price was something like $7.99; I spotted the similarity back then - a strange coincidence of having two people selling ultra-rare old Italian, South-American and Japanese made models with no boxes at the same time. I have purchased a few models from both- sometimes things like Nostalgic Miniatures and Playtoy Brianza went unnoticed in the heaps of toy-like Tootsietoys. I believe a portion of the same collection is still being sold off piece by piece by few US-based sellers. Some of the items I encountered on Ebay were straight from the Detroit in Miniatures book!
Now I am helping my friend to sell some of the items he was able to pick up at the auction house- I have close to a thousand catalogues (Matchbox are presented for every year in all different language versions!), original correspondence between James and various manufacturers and distributors, price lists from 30 years ago, some Japanese model magazines from the 70s and so on. I will be listing them on Ebay, will see how it goes- an enormous task was just to catalogue them all.

I never did well in writing essays - don't know how to end this one. It is also 2:30 AM...

I shall say - do not let your collections end up like that.